


FOXTROT WALKER BLUE

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: In the Flesh (TV), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Crossover, Jaeger Pilots, Kaiju Blue, Minor Character Death, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 95,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4010038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after extremists interrupt Dr Geiszler's famous speech, Amy Dyer meets Kieren Walker in the middle of the Bering Sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I: Kaiju

**Author's Note:**

> For [against_stars](http://archiveofourown.org/users/against_stars).
> 
> I started this in December, and 80k of it came together very suddenly in about three months. The rest of that time I spent nervously swinging back and forth, convinced it was too much, or too little, or too this, or too that. I annoyed my friends (thanks, guys.) I kicked and I chiseled and I erased a whole plotline just to find that another had sprung up to take its place. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but here it is: that goddamn jaeger pilots AU.
> 
>  **Warnings** for the general ITF stuff: suicide ideation, food-related neuroses, body horror, minor gore, and discrimination/oppression in all its forms. If the contents of the character death tag concern you, you can check the notes at the end.
> 
> Additionally, here's a quick **pictorial guide** to the ITF minor characters, because I acknowledge that not everybody memorizes them like I do:
> 
> [Zoe and Brian](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=128&pid=174944) \- didn't get the memo that anarchy usually ends badly  
> [Frankie and Henry](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=125&pid=119080) \- sad dead teenagers  
> [Ian Kugler](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=126&pid=145735) \- queued politely second from the right, has no lines in the whole show, VERY IMPORTANT TO MY HEART  
> [Freddie and Haley Preston](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=127&pid=145685) \- "till death do you part" HA HA HA HA sorry  
> [Oliver and Nina](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=130&pid=171189) \- did they tell you you'd be digging up graves when you applied to work for the government?  
> [Maxine Martin](http://kissthemgoodbye.net/tvshows/displayimage.php?album=127&pid=146507) \- i know you know who she is, i just wanted you to look at her face again YOU'RE WELCOME

*

 

*

**PART ONE: KAIJU**

(怪獣, kaijū, Japanese : giant beast)

*

 

*

 

Manila, afterwards, is called the City of Flowers.

Of all the city-cemeteries, Manila is arguably the most beautiful, both different and similar to the military-esque tomb of San Francisco Bay and the sunshine-struck glass monuments in Sydney. Pilgrims change the flowers daily -- memorials forming and decaying, materializing and growing, influenced by the patchwork quilt of Filipino culture. The Cebuanos sing their Latin, the Caviteños who survived Hundun’s attack come and they rope flowers to the trees, and where Manila City Hall once stood, a collage of broken plates forms a stunning, calm bayside scene which can only be properly viewed from the air. From jaeger-height, somebody tells him.

Kieren comes to the City of Flowers because Dr Geiszler gives a talk.

Of all the scientists who rose to prominence in the Kaiju War, many retired or moved into the pharmaceutical field, and those that went into lecturing spoke very carefully, like the names of the kaiju alone could summon them back from the breach. 

Newton Geiszler shows no such inclination.

He comes to present a K-science paper at the Catholic university in Manila, its main amphitheater a soaring cathedral built like a ribcage, and Kieren attends because he’s at the labour camp in the bay that year and because he needs to hear somebody talk about the kaiju in present tense -- how is the war over for anybody except maybe the most privileged, those who can afford to live inland and think that their problems are over because the breach is sealed?

Dr Geiszler’s introduced at length by the university dean.

The dean is famous for having a nationalist bent, skipping English entirely, and Kieren’s Tagalog is passable but not scientific.

The doctor himself is a middle-aged man with a lot of tattoos, and when he finally gets up and comes to the podium, he grabs the microphone from the dean and yanks it intimately close to his mouth like he thinks he’s the frontman of a band. He speaks in a flat English, and the screen beside the podium provides rolling translations in Spanish, Tagalog, and simplified Mandarin.

The crowd draws up around Kieren as soon as Dr Geiszler starts talking, a charged murmur skipping around like a stone over water.

In between the bodies, a spot of sunshine yellow briefly catches his attention, before being swallowed up again.

“-- Drifted with the brain of the newborn kaiju, I saw their world, I saw their plan -- everybody knows this about me, obviously, I’m kind of the only idiot who’s ever had the _cajones_ to do it,” and polite laughter ripples around. “They planned to colonize our planet, and that involved terminating the pests. Us.

“Now,” he steps away from the podium, gesticulating with his sleeves rolled up. “We managed to outsmart them in the end, but how many of you think that they’re still doing a pretty good job of poisoning our planet? The Kaiju Blue has contaminated, eh, pretty much every part of the globe. Our hydrological system needs to be reinvented like the wheel, we’ve got Zombies crawling --“

Kieren ducks his head, pulling at his hood, but nobody’s paying the white bloke in labourer greys any mind.

“-- everywhere, freaking us out because we don’t know what they can do or how many more of them there are going to _be,_ and our resources are _pffbblt.”_

He blows an overlarge raspberry, and feedback screeches back through the microphone in protest.

Ahead of Kieren, the crowd shifts, and this time, he sees where that yellow’s coming from.

A woman stands several rows ahead of him. A riot of flowers springs from behind her right ear, cascading down her shoulders like she herself is a city memorial, like she’s a walking graveyard. Her skirts are wide enough that it’s giving her a fraction of breathing room, and her jumper is the brightest thing in the room, sunshine-colored.

Suddenly, her head turns, searching, like she’s heard someone call her name.

Before he can think to look away -- up in the sanctuary, Dr Geiszler’s talking about the ecosystem and the Kaiju Blue again, which affects Kieren’s daily life in a way he really needs to pay attention to -- her eyes crack into his.

Just like that, without a doubt, Kieren knows that she’s just like him.

 

*

 

The next he sees her, it’s three years later, and winter’s made a minefield of the Bering Sea. Icebergs mob the rig, bumping and swaying, tinged an eerie kaiju blue from the contamination.

The girl from the City of Flowers comes in with the December rotation, and the relief is much anticipated, so after his shift Kieren joins the others coming out to greet them.

As usual, the new rotation is a motley mix of Americans, Russians, and Zombies -- the latter making the largest portion -- and through the crush of bodies all filing out onto the platform to stretch their legs at once, Kieren spots her: no flowers crown her head, and she’s in the same grey trousers the rest of them are, but his heart leaps with recognition and he steps forward without meaning to, almost colliding with Zoe Kelly. They step around each other, muttering.

“Ladies and gents,” bellows out the foreman, flipping pages on his clipboard absently like a freightman checking a purchase order, before handing off the whole thing to Phil Wilson, who stands at his elbow. “Welcome to the wonderful Aleutian Sector of the Anti-Kaiju Wall, your home for the next six months, unless you’re a particularly sick fuck, in which case, you might be here for years. Closest civilization is 550 miles away. Sucks to fucking be you.”

Beside him -- and much more entertaining to watch than the foreman’s thin lips that his tongue darts out to wet every fifth word -- Phil Wilson grimaces, like the curse words are the most offensive thing about that speech.

And since Phil Wilson is not who he wants to be paying attention to right now, Kieren edges around Zoe and looks back to the platform -- but the cemetery girl is gone.

He frowns, and then, before he can do more than turn his body in that direction, she appears in front of him. 

They stop, and look at each other, somehow equally startled.

Her mouth opens, and delight begins to radiate off of her like heat from a stove even as she says, “I _know you.”_

And, quieter, “I thought I had made you up inside my head.”

Up close, her eyes are wide and blue, blue, blue -- their old color bled away and their whites stained luminescent, phosphorescent, kaiju-colored in the dark.

 

*

 

In the beginning, finding people to work on the Wall hadn’t been hard. Everybody needs to eat, everybody needs to work, and the Wall provided both those things. Besides, for the average person, the Jaeger Programme was so _remote._ The lives of billions depended on the jaegers stopping every kaiju that neared a continental shelf, but the majority would go their whole lives without ever laying eyes on either.

And while that was fine at first, the support waned.

The Wall gave _everybody_ an opportunity to do their part protecting their towns and cities should the Jaeger Programme fail: which it did, in a self-fulfilling kind of way.

They started construction on the Anti-Kaiju Wall the year Kieren turned five. 

Growing up, he heard about it persistently, but distantly -- this was still back when the UK believed the kaiju were a problem for the Pacific nations only, and since the UK had no major Pacific coastline, it didn’t have anything to do with them.

(Reading about it later, Kieren finds no reference to how prevalent this belief was -- he remembers Pearl Pinder from the Legion shrugging about Honolulu, saying “where?” about Lima, and at the supper table, his father talked more vehemently about Clive Furness’s hedges than he did the crisis in the Pan-Pacific -- and figures that’s his countrymen erasing their own history to better paint them in the company of the victors. They’ll tell you the _whole_ world came together against the kaiju threat, and it’s true the RAF were on the scene on K-Day, and that the UK used the Pitcairn Islands -- its only territory in the Pacific -- as an excuse to elbow itself onto the Pan-Pacific Alliance, but some nations were slower than others.)

(“It’s a punishment from God, then, innit,” Bill Macy had grumbled, shifting a pint out of Dean’s reach. “That it’s our country that got the rotters first.”

“That wasn’t _God,”_ Kieren said, but uselessly -- he was paint on the wall to Bill Macy. “That was North Atlantic Current, bringing contamination up from Panama.”)

And then Marshal Pentecost led the Hail Mary Pass -- “ _HO brah,_ you really talking football?” hollers Mahmoud, his eyebrows bending up and stretching out over his forehead like professional athletes limbering up. Mahmoud is twenty-four, and from Montana. “The Hail Mary Pass is a football thing. I ain’t never been more proud of you, tea-time,” and Kieren says, “thanks,” in a tone dry enough to scrape paint -- and brought the last of the jaegers to the breach, and the attitude about the Wall changed to: _well … now what?_

Sealing the breach rendered the Wall useless.

Economically, this was a complete nightmare. The Wall was a beacon, a driving force for propaganda, and most importantly, too many people’s livelihoods depended on it. It couldn’t be abandoned. 

People needed to eat, people needed to work, people needed to feel like they were risking something to protect each other and what, to the average person who didn’t have a prayer of becoming a Ranger, was more dangerous than the Anti-Kaiju Wall?

So here they are, finishing the grand construction of a Wall against a threat that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not, actually, the most redundant job Kieren’s been asked to do, and really, with some of the public works sectors Zombies have been forced into, it could always be worse.

“You’re full of shit,” is Zoe’s professional opinion on that. She sets her jaw and glares him down. “I don’t want a pat on the head and to hear ‘it could always be worse’. I want better.”

“I know,” Kieren says quickly. Zoe Kelly always expects a fight; immediate acquiescence will sometimes derail her.

No luck. She twists her body around to face him over the bench back. “I want to have the same opportunities the regular, healthy labourers get! At the _very_ least, I want to be here because I _chose_ to be.”

“Hold the _fuck_ up, tea-time,” and Kieren, Pavlovian, looks up and over, but Mahmoud isn’t talking to him. He leans towards Zoe, expression intense. “Do you really think _any_ of us are here ‘cos we wanna be? ‘Regular’ labourers or not.”

Zoe gets that sunlit look on her face like she’s going to start a fight, and since Kieren doesn’t want to see Mahmoud turned into roadkill, he interjects. 

“Not on this rig.”

Mahmoud’s finger drifts over to point at him in a “you got it” gesture. “Ain’t nobody _volunteering_ to work up here, ma’am. The Aleutian’s the armpit of the entire PPDC. The only reason there’s more of you lot up here,” his gesture includes Zoe, Kieren, and a few other blue-eyed individuals by virtue of the fact they’re sitting nearby. “Than there are us is because they just happen to hate you a lil’ bit more right now.”

“You don’t need to tell _us_ that,” Zoe snaps. Her anger, however, is misdirected, and she knows it.

Mahmoud nods back at her in acknowledgement. “Now,” he crosses his arms behind his head, tossing his legs out in front of him. “If we were talking, like, the Wall by Fiji or sumfin, that’d be another story. I might fight somebody myself for a spot on that crew. Sun, surf, the beach bunnies …”

Somebody starts hooting, and Mahmoud shows his very white teeth.

“Right,” Pieter leans himself into the fray. Pieter weighs probably 17 stone or more; he’s mixed-race from Sapporo and speaks English with an Okhotsk accent. “Because the beach bunnies are always interested in _us.”_

Zoe’s expression turns concerned. She calls down to him, “Hey, now, don’t sell yourself short.”

They all look at her in surprise until she follows it up with, “They could have low standards.”

Mahmoud and Pieter both groan, and some cheeky woman a row ahead says “besides, the beach babes probably all got the blues these days, and why’d you want one of _them?”_ The tension eases back into something good-natured. Steady pulse or not, they’re all here to do the same job.

Kieren settles, propping his elbow up against the window and watching the length of completed Anti-Kaiju Wall speed past, hulking darkly against the storm-grey winter sea. On either side of the tram, icebergs dot the water like congealed clumps of sugar, near-invisible.

Someone told him once that there used to be a number of petrol pumps out in this part of the world -- the rig in the Aleutians had been abandoned in the war and promptly repurposed as a base for the Wall of Life operation, as it straddled the half-way point between the base at Sitka, Alaska (where Raleigh Beckett had lived and worked -- see, if it’s good enough for a Ranger, it’s good enough for them!) and the one at Kamchatka Krai. 

Supposedly, in places like this, Zombies were ideal labourers -- they weren’t affected by the temperatures the way healthy people were, which meant they could work the more dangerous jobs for longer periods of time. They were cheap to house, and the law didn’t say you _had_ to pay them in anything except their pills.

It got them away from the general populace, too. It was a win/win in everybody’s eyes, except, you know, theirs.

Each rotation cycled in more and more Zombies, but they shared the work with the healthy inmates. These were mostly Russian subversives and black and brown Americans sent here to serve out penal sentences; people who became opportunists during the Kaiju War, arrested for riots and widespread looting of the coastal cities. Never mind that that’s exactly what rich Americans were doing to the American heartland, abandoning the beachfront and building their housing developments on top of untouched ecosystems in places like Montana and Wyoming, driving up prices and making it impossible for those who already lived there to live there. 

That was different, apparently.

Kieren may have grown up a middle-class lad in rural England, but he’s three years and four labour camps away from that boy.

 

*

 

“I’m Amy Dyer.” She sticks her hand out across the table. He spots her identity chip, wrapped on a chain around her wrist, obscured under a half-dozen hair ties and a band of nylon flowers. “Not like, dire as in ‘it’s a dire situation’, but Dyer, as in ‘one who uses dyes.’”

“Kieren,” he returns, shaking the offered hand. “Kieren Walker, like the, um, the crisps.”

She flashes him a delighted grin. “Oooo, right, I had them once. ‘Course, I was really little.”

“Yeah, they’re not really … ration fare … yeah. I know they just gave you the tour, but the tour doesn’t include the important bits, so --”

“Bits like you?” Amy guesses.

“Yeah. Er. No.” He grimaces, flustered, and her grin widens. “I mean, us. Like, other Zombies. Um, here, this is Zoe, and that’s Brian.”

The cousins pull up some chairs, nodding in greeting. Zoe has platinum blonde hair, platinum blonde make-up, and a disturbingly reptilian tendency not to blink. She explains, “We’re kinda a set, but I’m the brains _and_ the brawn,” to which Brian just shrugs peaceably, not denying it. Brian has twelve different shrugs to communicate twelve different sentiments, a very Anglo-Saxon nose, and a hairline that isn’t so much receding as it is in full retreat.

As the others join them, they’re all introduced in turn -- Ian Kugler and Min Seong, Ngozi, Arabella, Freddie and Frankie, a rather gaunt older fellow who calls himself Chuckles who, as far as Kieren knows, has never laughed before in his life. Most of Kieren’s bunkmates and workmates come from the Atlantic countries (at this, Amy blinks at Min Seong, who rolls her glowing eyes and says, “I’m from Leeds, you sack of guts,”) and had never seen any part of a kaiju except on television, up until the moment they were contaminated.

The Pacific-born stick with Pacific-born, and those who were born by any other sea tend to group together, too. 

Differences in life experiences, you know.

Henry’s the last to arrive, throwing himself down on the floor at Frankie’s feet since all the seats are taken and the common rooms are tiny anyway. He sprawls out, seems to get comfortable, and then spots Amy.

“Oi!” he bolts upright. “I forgot -- new rotation! Hi there!” His hand shoots out. “I’m Henry Lonsdale.”

“Amy Dyer.”

They shake on it, and at the sound of her voice, Henry’s eyebrows perform the same excited acrobatics the rest of him always does. “Holy Hundun on a stick, another one from the homeland! Although, you sound like you’re from the north. Are you from the north?”

Amy darts a look at Kieren. “Yeah. Lancashire, nearabouts.”

Henry throws his arms up, making an exasperated noise. “Of all the places in the world you lot could come from, why is it _always_ the north? I mean, you’re not Scottish, I’ll give you that, but when are _my_ people going to arrive?”

Frankie aims a kick at him. “Henry, don’t be a blue about it.”

“Sorry, but,” Amy leans forward, the unraveling ends of her braid spilling over her shoulder. She stares at them. “How _old_ are you two?”

“Sixteen,” Henry answers promptly, and then starts laughing at Amy’s horrified expression. “What! It’s not like the PPDC cares, y’know? They see our disease first. That’s what they see first with all of us.” He flips his hood up and wriggles his fingers at them. “Our spoooooooky alien eyes.”

Amy drags her chair all the way around the table, ignoring the way it screeches at the lino. She shoves it into the space next to Kieren so she can sit down closer to Henry’s level. 

“So you’re saying they take children away from their families and stick them in the labour camps? Just like that?”

“Are you surprised?” says somebody else at the table.

Henry tips his head back to look at Frankie, who bites at her lip. A red scrap of fabric holds her curly, white-blonde hair away from her face -- on the Wall, she keeps it bound down, but off-shift, it tends to bush out, Einsteinien.

“Well,” she says. “My family turned me in for the reward, so …” 

And before anybody can do anything horrible like say something, she shrugs, saying quickly, “And since they got my computer -- obviously, a lot of us turned online to find others like us at first -- I gave Henry away, too --“

“You did no such thing,” Henry says quickly and with loyalty. “They were going to find me anyway, you just spared me from having to stop my mum from doing something drastic. Besides,” he grins at them. “Might have turned myself in, you know? It’s good money for a rotter!”

Kieren doesn’t want to hear about the money. He speaks up. 

“It’s only until they find a cure.”

This does nothing but make the whole table groan at him, and collectively, they lean away with disgust, like he’d gone and sneezed on them. Amy glances around, amused.

“They have to be close,” he insists, indignant. “You know they do! They don’t like us being what we are any more than we do.”

“Well, I dunno, _I_ kind of like it,” Henry jumps in, just to be a shit. “I don’t get spots anymore,” and “oi!” when Zoe mutters in an undertone, “nah, just that permanent one that’s your _face.”_

Kieren talks over them. “Like, isn’t this the same world that banded together and single-handedly drove off an alien invasion?” It was something his dad used to say about all the bad news in other countries -- petrol shortages and land crises. _Can’t last for long -- remember, we conquered the kaiju! This is nothing compared to that!_ “If they can do that, they can figure out how to reverse what happened to us.”

Amy twists back around, socking him in the arm. “I didn’t know you were such an optimist.”

“I’m not!” Kieren says, veering out of indignation and heading right into mortally offended.

“You are _soppy._ That was a soppy statement. Positively gooey. How did I not know this about you?”

“Speaking of!” Freddie Preston loudly bangs his elbows down on the table, and gestures between them, demandingly. “What?”

Amy worms her arm through Kieren’s, trapping it against her side. “Oh, we go back _forever.”_

“No, we don’t,” he says warningly. “I didn’t know your name before --“

“I met this handsome face in the City of Flowers.” She pats his cheek demonstratively. ‘’Course, that was back when we wore those contacts, awful things, but we knew, didn’t we? Soon as I saw him, I knew.”

“No --“

Unrepentant, her teeth begin to show. “-- that was the day of Dr Geiszler’s talk.”

Kieren closes his eyes, a moment before the table erupts.

 

*

 

Before Kieren did the unforgivable, he used to sit with Rick at the Macy’s front table while Rick’s mum cut them up sandwiches, and Bill Macy would recollect the time he served in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, which was before they were born and therefore a completely unfathomable time. Janet Macy stepped in with the occasional remark about how “maybe this isn’t appropriate talk for the table, Bill,” and Rick and Kieren would vocalize their protest (she tended to do this right when the stories got to their best parts, with the blown-off limbs and stuff,) which made Bill puff up his chest and tell his wife, “oh, come on, love, it’s just a story to them. They en’t lived it.”

His favorite topic was the kill-‘em-all equipment the Yanks were packin’, but he meandered, sometimes, into other things: how there were days when everything telescoped down to _survival,_ and on those days, you didn’t have time to worry about things like your boots pinching or your sunburn because you had to focus on not getting blown up. It was only when the day was done were those little things allowed to become important.

It was this way with the Kaiju Blue.

Everyone knew the Kaiju Blue was toxic. Everybody knew the Kaiju Blue -- which was any kind of kaiju biological waste; blood, excrement, or otherwise -- contaminated and killed entire marine ecosystems wherever it was spilled, and soon, the oceans would likely be barren except for what was preserved in aquariums. Everybody knew the Kaiju Blue killed people within 48 hours of exposure, sometimes less. It’s why the city-cemeteries are called city-cemeteries; kaiju killed people long after the kaiju had been killed.

But, in the grander scheme of the Kaiju War, it wasn’t important.

By the time the breach was sealed and everybody turned their attention towards fixing the damage, it was already too late.

There was diluted Kaiju Blue in the rains coming off the Pacific. It grew in the crops. It ran downstream in freshwater rivers in parts of the globe where no kaiju had ever set foot.

In concentrated doses, it could kill people who, geographically, should never have been in danger.

People, the way people do, learned to adapt. They purified everything before they ate it or drank it. In Kieren’s hometown, they had sirens that would go off if the rain was going to be toxic that day; as a kid, they’d looked forward to those rain days -- it meant no school.

But then there were the people who, after being fatally exposed to a dose of the Kaiju Blue simply … 

Didn’t die.

When they came for Kieren, they took him first to a facility in Norfolk, still so new that the unfinished plaster showed through the white walls and the hallways smelled like sawdust. The fences curled in close, electrified and crowned with barbed wire. They took his contacts and his clothes and put him in a room where he grew steadily colder and colder -- it’s not that they don’t _feel_ the cold, you understand, it’s just that when you’ve got the blues, it doesn’t slow you down any.

A man came in, eventually, and stood above Kieren. Unconcerned with his nakedness (like it didn’t even register that Kieren was embarrassed or even _should_ feel embarrassed,) he asked, “What lead to your contamination?”

“I don’t know,” said Kieren.

“When were you contaminated?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long ago were you exposed to the Kaiju Blue?”

“I don’t know.”

“How is it you came to be sick?”

And Kieren looked up at him, his irises as phosphorescent and blue as a sea creature’s. He lied: “I _don’t know.”_

 

*

 

Amy has to shout to be heard above the wind. 

“Do you ever wonder where the name ‘Zombie’ came from?”

He shoves his goggles up his forehead, squinting hard when the cold immediately bites at them. He reaches up to accept the rivet gun from her. “Like, in general, or specifically to us?”

“Us, dumb dumb.”

“I dunno. Probably because we’re cold and fishy and like, dead-ish? Corpse-like or whatever. Besides,” the new batteries go in with a forceful clunk. “What’s that saying, about how if you get close enough to a kaiju to see its blue, you’re dead? We probably looked like dead men walking to them.”

“That’s no excuse for their behavior.”

“ _Explaining_ behavior isn’t the same as excusing it.” He passes the rivet gun up again, and uses the momentary freedom this affords his hands to wipe his nose on his orange bib. 

She pumps the trigger a few times, testing. “You still think like them, don’t you?”

Kieren blinks and drops his hands, fighting the urge to check his harness and make sure he’s secure. Talking with Amy, he’s found, is a lot like standing in the aisle of a moving train, or trying to remain upright on a pitching boat -- he thinks he’s fine and then he’s suddenly off-balance, unable to predict how she’s going to unsettle him next. His hands find the carabiners holding him in place, and hold on. 

“What?”

“You,” she says. “You talk about them like you’re on their side.”

“I’m not -- ! What?” The wind blasts at them, and the Wall groans with the effort, putting its back up and surrounding them on every side. “There are no sides, Amy!”

She flattens her mouth at him, eyebrows cut right out of her forehead. It’s very impressive, how unimpressed she can look.

“We’re still human,” Kieren insists, ignoring the way it frosts against the roof of his mouth the way cold air does, leaving an empty sound in its place. “Our brains function. We need oxygen to live. Our hearts _beat._ Just … very, very slowly, is all.”

Amy shoves her hood back and leans down with deliberate care, so that her face hovers right above his own, and he can see his own blueness reflected back in her.

Her mouth sets into place. 

“And how many times are you going to have to repeat that for them -- ‘oh, I’m still like you!’ and ‘the heart of the human race all beats the same!’ -- before they say ‘oh no, you’re right, we’re so sorry!’ and let you go home, Kieren Walker? Hmm?”

“I --“ Kieren starts, but the rest of it lodges in his throat, forming a wintry patch he can’t speak around. His throat clicks dryly when he swallows.

She nods, like that’s answer enough, and pulls back. The rivet gun goes back into her utility belt, and she pivots on the beam, positioning the grips at the toes of her boots. Then she’s off, scuttling back up the scaffolding until it swallows the greyness of her.

Kieren forces out a sigh with the same kind of physical heave it would take to throw something over the edge. He rearranges his goggles back down over his eyes, glancing first at the sky, where the clouds hunch and bunch heavily together, reflecting the blue-silver of the sea and the ice, and then back down the Wall. Labourers dot the site in every direction, crawling around like fleas. Sparks from the welders bloom here and there, forming little cascading sprays of stars.

It’s easy to tell who’s a Zombie and who isn’t.

They move -- well, less like fleas, really, and more like something reptilian; geckos on a glass surface or something, Kieren’s seen those in films. Unencumbered by the heavy layers that keep the regular labourers from freezing to death, they move easier, scuttling fearlessly out over the open spaces.

Amy’s probably right, he thinks. Pulse or not, there’s no way to cover up just how unnaturally different they are.

“Oi!” comes from below him. “Kieren, mate, are you supply this shift?”

He shakes himself off. “Yeah!” he calls back. “How can I help? Batteries?”

“Naw, man, I need first aid. I sliced m’self open.”

“Dammit, Freddie. Again?” Kieren shoves his goggles up one more time so that his disappointed expression can be appreciated in its full effect.

Freddie Preston is what Kieren’s little sister would have called “a typical English boy” in the very specific tones that people reserve for other people who fit the stereotype _exactly._ He has his arm held out to his side, the sleeve ripped clear up to his elbow and hanging together by only a few threads, his skin pulped black and shimmering blue underneath.

Sighing, Kieren skids down to his level. 

“They’re going to write you up for damaging property,” he tells him, hiking his belt around to go digging for the first aid. In this case, it’ll probably be staples.

“Yeah?” Freddie shows teeth. The smell coming off his arm is stagnant, dead-blooded. The blue in it reflects eerily off the light. “Me or the uniform?”

“Freddie.”

“ _What.”_

 

*

 

In the beginning, Kieren’s read somewhere, work on the Wall was carefully regimented. Eight-hour shifts, mandated breaks. Health benefits were included, optical and dental -- that was important for Americans, he’s been told -- and you could choose where and when you wanted to rotate out.

The idea, of course, was to make the Wall of Life project as appealing as possible. It’s one thing to put people to work, but it’s another to make them _like_ it. You lure more flies with honey, or something like that.

After Mako Mori and Raleigh Beckett blew up the breach, those who could afford to stop working on the Wall promptly did so: there were other reconstruction projects taking off, after all, as people steadily started to migrate back to the coasts they’d been relocated from, delirious and hopeful. And so those that remained were the ones who _didn’t_ have a choice; the financially destitute, the incarcerated, and, eventually, the Zombies. 

“Sorry,” he says to Amy, sliding into the seat next to her. The tram smells like tired, dirty labourers and the putrid stench of an injured Zombie -- Freddie, he’s assuming, although he’ll learn later that he wasn’t the only one today; a girl from Los Angeles shot a bolt through her hand in one of the higher zones. “You’re right.”

The stiffness eases out of her shoulders.

“Oh. Well.” She clearly hadn’t been prepared for it to be that easy. 

She looks at him. Sunrise, this time of year, doesn’t come up over the Wall, but the darkness outside is a paler version of its usual self, promising. 

“That’s. True. But, um,” comes out of her, fumblingly. “You’re not wrong, either? Oh, don’t look at me like that, your face’ll get stuck.”

“Oh, really?”

“ _Yes,_ really! And then I’ll have to remember your name, instead of just saying ‘handsome’ all the time.”

His mouth twitches without permission. “You’ll just substitute for some other pet name.”

She shows her teeth, and settles their shoulders together. “See? You’re right more often than you think. They’ll cure us. We’ll keep reminding them until they do.” Her nose scrunches up. “Although, really, it should be _us_ finding a cure. What do they know about what it’s like? That’s a lot of trust to put in people who won’t ever have our problems.”

The doors begin to beep their ten-second warning, and the last remaining labourers climbing up the platform break into a sprint. Mahmoud slides in shoulder-first into their compartment just before the doors click shut, regains his balance, and looks around.

He converges on the empty bench in front of Kieren and Amy and drops onto it, tiredly stripping his gloves off. His knuckles are crusted white with cold even through the layers, and he twists around to fistbump Kieren over the seatback in greeting. Without hesitation, he offers his fist to Amy, too, who looks at it awkwardly for a beat before she realizes it’s for her, jolts, and bumps it back, her fist small and grey against his.

His eyes rest on them, lingering briefly at the place where their arms are touching. 

“Yo, I didn’t interrupt nothing, did I?”

Amy answers promptly, “We were just talking about how Zombies get taken from their homes and their professions immediately upon diagnosis, so the people who are most likely to _want_ to find a cure for the blues are the ones completely barred from it.”

Mahmoud blinks.

Then he says, “ _Damn,_ tea-time,” and lifts his hands, palms-up, like, _nope, this is too much, I’m out,_ before settling against the window. He pulls his helmet down over his eyes, but a beat later he peeks again, and the expression on his face is grave, and oddly kind.

“You okay?”

And this is why Kieren likes him best.

Amy smiles. “Yeah, we’re all right.”

He grunts, resettles his arms, and checks himself out of their conversation.

“Do you really think,” Kieren says to Amy, as the tram eases into movement and around them, everybody sinks down with the colorless exhaustion of commuters finally heading home. “That there are a lot of Zombies who used to be scientists -- like, chemists and geneticists and diagnosticians and what-have-you?”

He doesn’t actually know what branch of science it is that finds cures for stuff.

“I think a lot of the K-scientists probably died,” she answers baldly. “Don’t you? Like, we’re told they retired or moved into different fields, but that’s what we want to hear, isn’t it?”

Silence pulls itself between them, kicked into place with both of them aware of it, like it’s a blanket they’re trying to share.

He knows without asking that they’re thinking of Dr Geiszler, and Manila.

“So, yeah,” she concludes, eventually. “I think there are probably some who survived the Kaiju Blue. But more importantly, there are probably a lot of us here who’d _want_ to study K-science who aren’t getting the chance.”

She’s right, of course, and it makes him miserable that she’s right, but what is there to do?

“Do you want to be a K-scientist?” he asks her, solicitous.

It startles a laugh out of her, and she lifts her head off his shoulder, reaching behind her to start undoing her braid. The expression on her face tells him she knows he’s taking the piss. “No, actually, I think I’ve’d my fill,” she says wryly, and he grins back.

A pause.

Then she says, “I’d go home and take care of my nan. That’s it. That would be my aspiration, if I got to do it again. Silly, huh.”

“Sounds big to me,” he replies. He’d wanted to go to art school, and that currently feels about as far away as the moon. 

Right now, though, he’ll jump through whatever hoops it takes to get the chance to see his family again. Or even to hear Jem’s voice … he’ll settle for anything, at this point.

The conversations around them filter in: a few people with energy left in them to be rowdy are lobbing a water canteen back and forth over the aisle, getting louder with each successive pitch and catch; others complaining about the shift, the supervisors, who did what or didn’t do what, this or that equipment that was failing and out-of-date. Others are talking about dinner. Breakfast. Whatever meal it is -- it’s for the people who eat, so Kieren hasn’t even once paid attention.

“There’s church after C shift today,” Amy says suddenly, and he lifts his eyebrows, puzzled. “Do you want to go?”

 _No,_ he wants to say; his reaction to the word “church” is kneejerk from years of dodging men in button-up shirts handing out pamphlets in the supermarket, but something about the careful way she’s holding herself makes him stop.

“I didn’t know you went to church,” he says instead, which is dumb, because how would he? It hasn’t come up yet. And they didn’t even have time to exchange _names_ in Manila, much less the details of their churchgoing habits. “What denomination?”

As soon as he says it, he realizes it’s an even dumber thing to say.

“Oh,” he goes. “Of course. Buenakai.”

“You should come with me!” she says, encouraged. And, at the expression on his face, “Oh, come on, you’ll get to meet my friends! After all, I’ve met yours --“

She gestures, and Freddie Preston picks that moment to say, loudly and with great relish, “Man, I thought my _muscle_ was going to fall out, it looked all, like, skewered and shit,” and Kieren carefully avoids meeting Amy’s eyes because he knows if he does, neither one of them is going to be able to resist the urge to add, “-- such as they are.”

“I’m not a church person, Amy.”

“Have you ever gone?” 

It’s one of those stupid, perfectly reasonable questions that adults ask because they already know the answer and they want to be frustrating. Kieren shoots her a look, and she grins, self-satisfied.

(He can already tell this is how they’ll operate: Amy always verbally sticking her leg out to trip him up, him always making her grin.)

He has been, actually. There’d been a priest at the labour camp in Lamon Bay, and the church was a makeshift thing designed to fold up and vanish under chairs and coats should anyone come knocking -- you needed a permit from the camp administrators to host any gatherings above thirty people, and no Buenakai church was ever going to be granted one. The stained glass windows were printed on graphing paper, and never unrolled entirely -- scenes of Reckoner and Onibaba and a few kaiju he couldn’t recognize on sight forever trying to curl at the corners and hide.

Kieren’d tried on a few different occasions to go.

After all, it made a little bit more sense to him than any of the other eschatologies on the market. Kaiju, at least, had a physical presence, and didn’t have to be taken on faith. If you had to worship something that was vast and frightening and incomprehensibly powerful, then it’s more reasonable to worship something that had corporeal volume and mass, something that could be studied and understood by science, its motivations parsed by priests, right? You should be as informed as possible about something before you decide to name it holy.

So he understands _why_ the Buenakai believe the kaiju are -- _were_ \-- gods sent to perform a reckoning, to wipe the earth clean like Gilgamesh and Noah, but growing up with Rick Macy and the Macy’s cross-studded mantle, however, meant that he’d heard it called a “cult” too many times with just the right level of derision to feel comfortable attending.

“Did you know,” says Amy. Her enthusiasm makes a bright cherry stain in her voice. “That the Buenakai think we’re holy?”

“Who?”

Kieren’s three for three with dumb statements now.

“Oh. Zombies?” She nods. “Well, that’s a nice change of pace.” 

The tram passes again into the shadow of the Wall; darkness blots out her face. All along the compartment, blue eyes blink in and out ethereally.

“We’re their creations. The Kaiju Blue existed since K-Day, but _we_ didn’t exist until after the breach had been closed -- clearly we were planned. We were _supposed_ to happen. _We_ are the ones who’d benefit most from the Second Coming of the kaiju.”

“Do they think that’s really going to happen?”

They hit a jolt, which finally reactivates the strip lighting inside the tram car. He sees her teeth, winking at him.

“Come to church,” she wheedles. “And ask. With _exactly_ that expression on your face. It’ll be priceless.”

He smirks, good-natured, and when he glances away from her, he finds Mahmoud watching them from under half-lidded eyes, his expression soft at the edges and sinking in the middle with fondness.

“Careful,” Kieren warns him. “Your face will get stuck like that.”

“You can’t recycle her insult, tea-time. Besides, if she can get you to go to church, maybe I still have a chance of gettin’ you to join a game, hey?”

“No,” Kieren says flatly. “I’m too British for your version of sport. Too much tackling.”

“Kieren, sweetheart,” Amy cuts in, her tone perplexed. “We invented rugby, that’s -- _hey!”_

Her eyes flare indignantly wide.

“He _kicked_ me!” she tattles, with more wounded pride than any real pain, and Mahmoud laughs.

Back at the rig, they leave the tram in a scraggly line, and as they swipe their identity chips through to check in, Amy loops her arm through his and leans on him. “Well?”

“Well?” Kieren echoes.

She knocks their heads together, goggles clacking, and they grin stupidly.

“Are you coming to meet my friends or not?”

“They came with you on rotation, did they? So not people I’ve met?”

“Yeah,” she says happily. “I’ve been saving him for a rainy day, he’s great.”

 _Oh._

He’s starting to see the lay of it now.

“You make him sound like a biscuit,” he says.

“More like a good book,” she insists, and then lilts her voice up. “And he’s _handsome.”_

“Is he?” Kieren says politely.

“Well …” Her nose scrunches up, and she gives it a moment’s serious consideration. “More or less.”

He laughs. “Ouch!”

“He has _really_ terrible hair,” she confesses, her whole face going crinkled and apologetic, like she can sense the tatters she’s making of her friend’s ego when he isn’t here to defend himself, but can’t help it. “He combs it over and it’s --“ she gestures, and Kieren grimaces with understanding. “But it’s even _worse_ when he doesn’t. So nobody says anything.”

She pauses.

“Don’t mention the hair.”

“I won’t mention the hair,” Kieren promises, amused, and only realizes the trap he walked into when she squeals joyfully and knocks into him again. “No, that’s not -- !”

“Too late, you’re coming! I’ll come pick you up at the end of C shift, then, shall I?”

She releases him, stepping back. There are burns on her hands and dirt smeared all down the knees of her trousers to the tops of her too-big boots, and she looks electric, lit-up, and so unspeakably excited that Kieren smiles, and nods, and it isn’t even hard.

He’s successfully managed to talk himself out of it by the time the next shift changes over; it’s four hours to convince himself he doesn’t really want to go, or leave his bunk until the second he has to for the next morning’s shift.

“Why not?” she frowns. 

She’s the city-cemetery girl again, hair tucked up under a band with a pipe cleaner flower perched above one ear. Everything the labourers own is in some shade of grey, and it’s only when you’ve lived in a camp for awhile can you really tell the difference between dress-down greys and on-shift greys. He wonders if she misses her skirts.

She leans in, intent, and he shrugs noncommittally. “Churches aren’t really my thing.”

She senses the lie, and sidesteps, zeroing in on the real issue unerringly.

“Why don’t you like meeting new people?”

“Well.” He sidesteps, too, but physically, since Ian Kugler’s trying to squeeze past him to get into the room, and then he’s standing out in the corridor, which is where he doesn’t want to be. “What if --“

He puts his back up against the wall and fidgets.

“What if they die?”

Amy blinks.

“No, I’m serious. That’s what we do. We meet people and we meet people and then one day we stop and we look back and out entire lives are pockmarked with people who aren’t there anymore.”

“Kieren …”

She trails off, and he shrugs. When she just keeps looking at him, he shrugs again, more pointedly. He’s used up his words about it.

She surprises him then, by cracking her shoulder into him.

Her hair’s in his mouth, and he puts his arms around her and hugs her back.

“My nan used to say the same thing about her retirement home,” she tells him, transferring her hold so that she’s got him around the shoulders like a benevolent big sister. “You make friends with people just in time to go to their funerals.”

“Yeah,” says Kieren, feeling a bit shaky and a lot embarrassed about it, the way you always do when you’ve just been overly honest about something. “Yeah, something like that. I don’t want to hear about anybody’s deaths from the _foreman,_ of all insensitive people. I don’t want people to have to come to my funeral. We’re really expendable, Amy.”

And there it is: if you’ve got the blues, you work at a labour camp until you literally fall apart.

He pushes himself off the wall. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”

“Oh,” says Amy with surprise, still attached to him. “I was going to say, you can stay here if you want, I don’t mind, honest.”

He slips out from under her arm, and walks backwards so that he can say, “I know. That’s why I’m okay.”

 

*

 

For his entrance exam, back when he thought art school was going to be a thing, Kieren wrote an essay on the evolution of street fashion in the city-cemeteries -- focusing specifically on San Francisco, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, which all became city-cemeteries at different points during the Kaiju War and so developed uniquely afterward -- and the dynamic, ever-shifting relationship people had with the brightest shades of blue.

Cyan, turquoise, even mint and robin’s-egg blue to some degree -- these were kaiju-blue, the color of their blood and their bioluminescence, their eerie grinning mouths, and to wear kaiju-blue was a statement; when you became the blue, you became the nightmare.

For Kieren at seventeen, it was fascinating to track the way people’s attitudes toward it changed, from staunch avoidance to countercultural reclamation -- it wasn’t even an overall trend, but came and went in microcosms. His advisor said it showed.

 _It’s easy to tell you’ve got a passion for this, Kieren,_ she told him, helping him tidy it up for submission. _I really don’t think you have to worry about acceptance._

Of course, Kieren at twenty would probably restructure the whole thing from the ground up, go ridiculously past the accepted word count, and include a lot more about Zombies wearing blue in the city-cemeteries.

Both the blue and the cemeteries were, after all, their birthright.

Before the PPDC implemented a reward system for Zombie detainment, you could find communities of them living freely in the city-cemeteries; they didn’t need running water or access to uncontaminated food, and it wasn’t like they could get _more_ poisoned.

Everybody wore contacts in public to hide their signature blue eyes in those days, because there’s a difference between reclaiming your heritage and outright triggering regular survivors, so people got creative with how they signaled to other Zombies what they were, and a lot of it came through naturally in how they dressed; scarves, shoelaces, earrings and bracelets in the brightest shades of blue. One of Zoe’s most personal possessions is a photograph of her against the brick of a demolished wall, tiny blue LED lights strung up around her head like a crown of thorns.

When Amy pulls him into a room full of folding chairs, he finds that Simon Monroe wears a blue clerical collar under his labourer greys.

Kieren looks at him, and his essay is the first thing he thinks of.

 _Priests,_ he realizes all at once, and stands up a little straighter, overcome with a retroactive horror. All that length talking about fashion in the city-cemeteries and he’d completely forgotten to _mention_ Buenakai priests, and the kind of mass cultural blending that resulted in their ceremonial dress; both the everyday outfit and the special ones they only wore when there was movement in the breach.

They’ll tell you that humanity put aside its differences and came together to face the kaiju threat, and it did, in war and in religion.

Shit. Well, now he feels stupid.

Slowly, around the edges of this, Kieren becomes aware that an expectant sort of silence has fallen.

He glances up.

They’re both watching him. Simon’s eyebrows tick up, inquisitive, and Kieren realizes he’s been staring, unblinking, for an inappropriately long time.

Promptly, he panics.

He darts his eyes from Amy back to Simon, stopping first at the collar and then up, to his face, and --

It skids out of his mouth and lands with an awkward splat at their feet.

“Wow, your hair is _really_ terrible.”

Simon’s eyebrows tilt even higher, and he turns this expression on Amy, who says instantly, “I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t say anything.”

“Well,” he looks back, and Kieren fights the urge to shrink and disappear. He should have just stayed in his bunk. You can’t embarrass yourself if you never leave your bunk. Simon has a deep voice, a thin papercut of a mouth, and hair like a dodgy life insurance salesman, black and slicked close to his skull. “It’s the hair I’m going to be living with indefinitely, so …”

“Right, no, you’re right,” Kieren mutters, humiliated. 

Other churchgoers arrive and divert Simon’s attention, and while his back is turned, Amy dives in and hits Kieren’s shoulder one, two, three times, hard.

 _Sorry, sorry,_ he mouths, cringing.

 _What is_ wrong _with you?_ she mouths back furiously. _What did I tell you!_

_Don’t mention the hair._

_What did you_ do?

_I mentioned the hair._

She hits him one more time, for emphasis, at which point Simon finishes his perfunctory conversation and turns back to them. They immediately straighten up, looking innocent, and his smile turns amused.

“Oh, dear,” he says, and not only is his voice deep, but he drags at it like he’s pulling it across gravel. It’s the kind of voice you pay attention to, on the off chance that murder’s involved. “There are two of you now. Are you sure,” this is addressed to Kieren. “That she didn’t make you up inside her head?”

“So what if she did?” Kieren fires back hotly, and then, “no, wait,” because that doesn’t make sense.

He’s saved from another judgmental flick of Simon’s eyebrows by the arrival of the cousins, who have Henry Lonsdale in tow.

“I like the singing,” Henry volunteers without being prompted, darting around them in order to snatch up a hymnal. He gets two paces before he realizes it’s the Russian version, comes back, and switches it for the English. 

Nobody’s paying attention to him, though: they’re all looking at Zoe without trying to look at Zoe.

She catches them at it, and the expression on her face darkens. Her idea of dress-down greys includes a raggedy, patchwork jacket that makes her shoulders look like a linebacker’s. (“Ho, brah, another football reference!”) Kieren looks at it instead of the horror around her face.

Behind her, Brian shrugs in a helpless way, and Zoe says, with difficulty, “They filed my mouth today.”

Kieren, Amy, and Simon all flinch.

“Sorry,” Amy tells her sympathetically, and Zoe glowers, but not at anybody in particular.

They pick up their hymnals, passing two to Amy and Kieren, who flips his open immediately to see where it was printed. There isn’t much available for reading on the rig; the inmates have their own lending library, which Zombies don’t have the clearance to use, although a black market will readily provide if you aren’t picky about the quality of your literature. The hymnal’s still new, battered only at the corners from being boxed and unboxed every week, and inside, he sees that it’s been printed by a company he doesn’t recognize based in Salt Lake City. Kieren doesn’t think he’s thought about Salt Lake City once in his entire life, although he thinks it might be inland. He flips through the pages, and hopes he doesn’t have to sightread this music.

Kieren’s little sister had always carried a book on her -- she read infrequently, in a feast or famine kind of way, where she’d carry a book around with her class schedule shoved in as a bookmark, and read bits or pieces of it before one day she’d sit down, put her headphones on, and power through the rest of it in one hungry sitting. The rest of the time, it sat lost among a hundred other things in her messenger bag, the one with all the safety pins on the front, so that when she flapped the bag closed it made a terrific amount of noise, like a ghost rattling her chains. It was always overstuffed, crowding him if they ever had to pass through a doorway at the same time. Dad told her she looked like a pack mule, and Mum was worried that she’d do irrevocable damage to her spine. Holding the hymnal makes Kieren miss her like he’d been shot.

“Shall we?” says Amy, linking her arm through his.

 

*

 

Kieren works the B shift, and has for almost as long as he’s been here. Part custodial and part Wall work, it covers a chunk of time that, had he been back home, would have lasted from predawn to just shortly after dinner. The rest of the time is his, and when you’ve got the blues, sleep is one of the few things you need with the same regularity you needed it when you were healthy. Kieren’s gotten very good at it.

Today, when he crosses under the large monitor by the tram platform that outlines their zones for the day, he stops walking and says, “Come _on.”_

“What?” says Amy. And then, “Oh, great.”

 _Zone A - Top of the Wall_ crowns the zoning list, and underneath it, Kieren’s own name sits nestled between “Uchima, Sen” and “Watson, Clementine.” Amy’s name is a few columns over.

“Well, at least we’re together,” she sighs.

The success of the Wall of Life operation depended on the top of the Wall being what it is: impossible to mount, impossible to cross, the finest feat of both warfare and engineering. From the sea, the Wall was a completely smooth, stainless expanse that rejected both suckering and footholds, tapering outward at the top so that anything (read: a kaiju) climbing it from the seaside would be forced to go near-horizontal just to breach it. The other side was a mass of steel spikes, pitfalls, and barbed, electrocuted nets, waiting like traps. 

The rest of the Wall had to be built sturdy enough to support being that top-heavy -- in Sydney, Muttavore circumnavigated all of this by simply punching through, which it shouldn’t have been able to do. 

(Or, as Dr Geiszler had said, “Aliens 1, Humans Nada, good try, suckers!”)

It was also the most dangerous place to work. If you fell from the top of the Wall, you had nowhere to go but straight down, and there wasn’t a lot to think about. Almost no living person had to work a shift at the top anymore, as it was considered inhumane; Raleigh Beckett had said something to that effect. So these days, those crews were all Zombies. It was partially, Kieren figured, why they all had to wear the orange bibs; it made them easier to fish out from the icebergs, later.

“Not a big fan of heights, are you?” Amy asks him on the lift up.

On her other side, Freddie Preston tugs on his earlobe and yawns his mouth to get his ears to pop. The fabric of his sleeve puffs out around the bandages over his sliced-open arm.

“It’s not heights I have a problem with,” Kieren replies. “It’s the top of the Wall.”

The wind at the top is a monstrous thing, driven down from the Arctic through the Bering Strait and then slammed straight up the wall, where it goes screaming through the netting and the pikes and makes the scaffolding shiver. It bites with prejudice. The supervisor, being the only one who doesn’t have the blues, shoves his shoulders up around his ears and curses in a language several profanities removed from English and balefully starts dolling out tasks. He shoves the bibs onto Clementine Watson, who glares deliberately over his left shoulder before passing them down the line.

Kieren takes his and shakes it out of its fold, passing the rest on.

“Thanks,” says Simon Monroe politely. “Kieren, isn’t it?”

Kieren pauses and stares, bib half-stretched over the arm of his coat. He doesn’t remember seeing Simon’s name on the list, but then again, “Monroe” wasn’t anywhere near “Dyer” or “Walker”, so he hadn’t actually been looking.

“Is this where you’ve been zoned?” he asks skeptically.

“No,” Simon answers with a smile. It widens when Amy spots him, him mirroring her delight in a paler, if genuine way, the same way the moon reflects the light from the sun. 

She steps in and shouts out a greeting, then promptly positions them so that he blocks most of the wind.

“They’ll write you up,” Kieren warns him. “For not being in your zone.”

“And what are they going to do to me?” Simon looks unruffled. “Send me to a more remote rig?”

Which, yes, is a good point, and somehow, that just makes Kieren angry. 

It’s something about Simon that gets to him, he figures -- the slimy, salesman look of him makes you want to argue, for absolutely no good reason.

“And how did you wind up here, Kieren? On the Aleutian.” He tries to move away, but Simon’s voice just follows him, the deep and the drag of it. “You don’t strike me as the type to cause trouble.”

Kieren thinks of the hot, glassine sunshine in Manila, of Dr Geiszler with his arms flung wide, and says, “I was unlucky.”

Simon studies him, his eyebrows lifting to a near church-like arch. The bib’s thrown over his shoulder like he doesn’t have the time for it, one hand holding it in place so the wind doesn’t snatch it up.

“What’s the most rebellious thing you’ve ever done, then?”

Kieren rolls his eyes so hard he almost feels it. “Why do I get the feeling I’m being judged and found wanting?”

“Never,” Simon promises, although whether he means never judged or never found wanting, Kieren can’t tell.

“I,” he says with great ceremony, because now Amy’s watching him curiously, too. He lifts a finger and then slowly turns it to point back towards the supervisor. “Have never bothered to learn any of their names. Them, and especially not the foreman. When they deserve it, I will.”

It earns him a noncommittal noise, but fortunately, Amy jumps in then, leaving the shelter of Simon’s wide shoulders so that they can take their places, scattered higher up in the scaffolding. She asks a follow-up question to the sermon from the day before, about the traces of helium-3 they caught readings of around the breach. Presumably, as helium-3 does not naturally occur on Earth very often, it’s a leak from the kaiju homeworld, wherever that might be; astronomers were still no closer to pinpointing its location than they were reverse-engineering a portal to take them somewhere new, though not for lack of trying.

He listens to their back-and-forth, chunks of it lost in the wind and under the screeching, masticating sounds of machinery as it warms up.

He supposes that Buenakai sermons had probably been different during the Kaiju War, when the threat of complete annihilation was immediate and rather pressing, but now they’re more like debriefings: here’s what K-science has found out about the kaiju since the last time we met, let’s discuss.

(It won’t occur to him to ask, later, how Simon gets new information; after all, that’s what priests do, isn’t it? Know?)

Some time later -- an hour, maybe more -- he hears his name, and tunes back in time for Amy to finish “-- was the one who wanted to go to college, not me.”

“Oh?” Simon’s gaze widens to include him. “What were you going to college for?”

“Art school. For design,” Kieren returns to their side under the guise of inspecting each other’s available tools. “If there was no call for that, then I wanted to do a reading in art restoration.”

Amy leans over. “In the city-cemeteries?” she asks, a sudden understanding making her expression expand.

“Yes,” says Kieren. “Places where art got damaged or stolen during the war. Did you know that after Cabo -- when, you know, the army bombed Kaiceph to pieces and destroyed three-quarters of the city doing it -- museums in cities located along the Pacific Rim started packing up their most valuable paintings to cart them inland?” He taps his hands restlessly in time with his words. “Some places, of course, prioritized the evacuation of their people, or fortifying their defenses, or what-have-you, so in places like Sydney and Honolulu, they’re still cataloging missing or damaged artworks. Museums have a disheartening tendency to be located on waterfronts, it’s terrible.”

He pauses for breath. The labourers have all spread out now, bright spots of orange crawling up and around the top of the wall, except for a cluster around the pulley. That’s where the supervisor is, and from what Kieren can tell, he’s too busy yelling at Freddie Preston about something to notice that Kieren’s running his mouth.

Freddie has his head down, the picture of chastisement, but he keeps twisting the wedding ring on his left hand in short, violent gestures.

“So, that’s what I’d do.” He turns back to Simon and Amy in time to catch them exchanging a look. Not without some dismay, he notes that they both have eyebrows. They have eyebrows the way Brian has shrugs; they use them like they’re a hitherto unknown form of communication, expressive and near-acrobatic.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Amy, reaching out and snagging at him. “Here, stand here please.”

She positions him, and the wind gives Kieren a shove straight at the back of his neck, rocking him forward onto the balls of his feet. Amy grimaces; Kieren isn’t wide enough to protect her at all.

“Yeah, you’re going to want Simon’s shoulders for that,” he tells her dryly.

She scoots in closer, dropping her voice. “Aren’t they _great.”_

In unison, they both turn their heads; Simon’s looking out across the pockmarked sea, in a polite way, like he’s avoiding -- oh, dear, like he thinks they want privacy and is trying to give them it even when standing right there.

“They’re better than his hair, I guess,” he allows, and she smiles with all her teeth.

And then, from below them:

A screech.

Everything freezes.

It isn’t the screech of metal on machinery, of a torque or a drill bit or even the pulley hauling cement blocks up to them from the workers in the zones below. It isn’t the screech of the wind twisting its way through the narrow gaps in the wall. Any of that would be commonplace.

This is the sound that the human hindbrain has been taught to fear. It rhymes with the color blue.

It’s a kaiju noise.

Kieren moves, same time everybody else does. The sounds of work all cease; figures in grey and orange stick their heads out of everywhere, wide-eyed and hunting for the source. 

Kaiju noise, kaiju noise, it’s a monster’s noise, and they are on the Wall, facing the breach.

“Freddie,” Kieren says, too quietly for the wind to do anything more than snatch it up, but Amy catches the shape his mouth makes. She cranes her head, looking.

On the platform by the pulley, Freddie Preston’s body makes a knotted, hunched-over shape, arms wrapped around his abdomen in the manner of someone who’d just been kicked. The others form a loose semi-circle around him, and the supervisor’s been knocked on his ass, scrambling to get his arms under him and push himself back up. 

Freddie’s back heaves, and as Kieren watches, three globs of brilliant, icy blue drip from his mouth, hitting the boards.

It’s not the muddy blue-black of Zombie blood, but something phosphorescent and fresh. 

Something living.

Freddie’s whole body flings itself open, and with his head thrown all the way back, he opens his throat and screeches again.

Zombies go pinballing in every direction, and the supervisor scuttles backward until his head rings against a metal bar. Freddie’s mouth, his nose, his ears are all bleeding a brilliant, bloody blue, coursing over his chin and neck in thin streams. He shakes his head, chokes, gags, and roars again, his whole body craning to the left.

He staggers, closes his glowing mouth, and looks around with eyes that are impossibly bright.

He looks lit up, the way poisonous reptiles do when they’re announcing to the world that they’re deadly. He also looks hurt, the skin on his face drawn taut with pain.

“Feral,” says Simon lowly from behind him. “Jesus, he’s gone feral.”

And Kieren doesn’t remember if he’s _ever_ seen Freddie go in to have his mouth filed.

 _“Freddie -- !“_ he starts, and gets no further before two hands seize him by the arms and haul him bodily backwards. Below, Freddie bellows out a challenge, twisting his body in the direction of Kieren’s voice. Cursing, Simon pulls him down, flattening them both out of sight against the bare struts of the scaffolding. 

“Stay still,” he says, near-inaudible.

“I don’t think that works for kaiju,” Kieren mutters back, irritated. It isn’t discomfort, exactly, but he can still feel the pressure of Simon’s hands on his arms somehow. “This isn’t Jurassic Park. We’re not invisible if motionless.”

“Shh.”

When you contract the blues, it manifests firsts in the eyes; the color in them leeches away like a book cover fading in sunlight, until they start burning blue.

Kieren hadn’t noticed it at first, when he was still living at home. He avoided mirrors -- not for any particular reason, but mostly because there was nothing new to see -- and so it wasn’t until the day of the eclipse, when his dad took him through the woods to the valley lookout point, that it occurred to him. Dad had been stumbling and muttering, “blast, I can’t see a thing,” probably regretting suggesting that they do this (as a father and son thing, you understand, it had nothing to do with Rick’s … well, with Rick, just, they hadn’t done anything together in a while, eh?) and Kieren said, “Really? I can see perfectly.” 

It dropped on him like a guillotine falling, and when he got home and got in close to the glass and saw the blue swimming in his irises, he muttered, “shit.”

It’s easy to hide with contacts at first, but it spreads to the whites and then it gets harder. At Norfolk, and then in the Philippines, Kieren met people who’ve offered to bleach the whites, and met people who’ve done it. It never looks exactly right; you can always tell there’s something unnerving underneath.

And if it wasn’t the eyes, it could be a number of other things ready to betray you; the slow, slow heartbeat, the quiet lungs, the complete disinterest in human food and the neural receptors that didn’t send or receive much in the way of sensation; hot or cold or comfort or pain. 

There are little hard calluses that form along the wet, mucosal walls of the mouth. K-science calls them polyps, and they grow like warts. (“Or like syphilis!” Henry Lonsdale contributes, which earns him a smack and a “what do you know about it?” from Frankie.)

There’s medicine that keeps them benign, keeps them small.

Supposedly, that’s part of what the labour camps are about; Zombies “earning” their care and upkeep.

Periodically, medicine or not, the polyps get too large and need to be filed back. It’s not pleasant, but it’s also not pleasant when they swell and burst, either, from something so simple as a mistimed bite to the cheek. It’s like being poisoned. It’s like watching a wild animal with rabies. 

It’s bleeding blue out the mouth, out the nose, out the ears. It’s going feral.

Below, Freddie howls in agony, a terrible kaiju sound.

Kieren doesn’t think he’s ever asked Freddie what his wife’s name is.

He twists sideways -- Simon curses, hands snatching at empty air, and Amy hisses out a terrified noise -- and drops, grabbing the bar and swinging down a level. His feet thump against the boards, and Freddie’s head snaps up, reptilian. The supervisor plays possum nearby; clearly he thinks kaiju operate like Jurassic Park, too.

Freddie staggers, and his heel catches on the edge of the scaffolding, pitching him even more off-balance. He bangs hard against the railing.

Kieren’s stomach plummets: if you fall from the top of the Wall, there’s nowhere to go but straight down with not a lot to think about.

“Freddie!” he shouts.

Freddie opens his mouth and screams back, full and throaty and showing the luminescent growths on the insides of his cheeks.

“Freddie,” Kieren says again, taking a careful step forward, then another. A hiss greets the sound of his footsteps, but there’s no attack. “Freddie, do you know where you are? It’s me, Kieren, I’m in the bunk across from you, remember? So’s Chuckles. He snores.”

A blink.

“Ian keeps on saying we should stuff a sock in him and see if that changes anything. But who knows where our socks have been, right?”

Another blink. Kieren’s close enough now to see the cracked edges around Freddie’s mouth, the tinges of red staining the blood still trickling from his ears. Everybody knows, thanks to Dr Geiszler, that the kaiju were carefully designed by their overlords to have every evolutionary advantage over the human race, so as to better extinguish them. 

_The blues might be an act of biological warfare left for us in case the invasion failed,_ Kieren thinks, mutinous. _But you can’t turn a human into a kaiju. You can’t._

His eyes drop to the wedding ring on Freddie’s hand.

“What were your vows, Freddie?” he asks, and the sound Freddie makes then is almost like a chirp, questioning. “What did you promise?”

Another step.

“Did you vow to honor and cherish her? Till death do you part?”

Another. Freddie’s eyes track his movements, unblinking. Clinically, Kieren can tell this is very frightening -- from here, it would be easy as anything for Freddie to go for his throat -- but he doesn’t have the time to be frightened. 

“You’re not dead, Freddie,” he tells him. “You’re _not dead.”_

Freddie twitches towards him. Underneath the blue, he’s got stick-out ears and freckles, and Kieren hears his sister’s voice, saying, _he looks like a wanker, Kier._

_So, typical English boy?_

_Exactly._

“That’s right,” he says with relief, as Freddie’s hand suddenly grips at the sleeve of his coat. He grips back, reassuring him urgently, “You’re all right.”

He has no idea what to do or how to handle this, but he’s thinking that if he can just get Freddie off the top of the Wall, maybe they can give him a sedative back on the rig so that he doesn’t fight or choke himself to death. There’s got to be some way to drive that rabid response back down. 

Surely it’s been done before?

Freddie grumbles something wetly, a garbled, inquisitive sound, and Kieren’s saying, “what’s that?” before Freddie’s eyes suddenly go sharp, darting to something behind him.

It’s over very suddenly.

A hand grabs the meat of Kieren’s shoulder, canting his weight backwards as it uses him as counterbalance so that a very heavily booted foot can javelin into Freddie’s chest. Effortlessly, Kieren’s arm tears out of Freddie’s grip. He staggers, hits the railing and sprays blue blood across the metal, and his arms pinwheel for purchase before --

He tips, mouth still open in a half-roar, and is gone.

Kieren screams. 

The hand releases him briskly, and the supervisor pats himself down like he’s checking to make sure none of the blood got on him and says, self-satisfied, “Well, that takes care of that rot.”

Swinging on him, Kieren can do nothing for a moment but stare in horror -- the supervisor stares back, eyebrows lifted, like, _what?_

He’s just decided on violence when he’s grabbed again, this time from behind.

Simon’s arm locks around his shoulders, hauling him back, and Amy’s hands grab his before they reach their destination, which is around that smug, pulse-beating throat. She pins them against his chest and he yells inarticulately.

“Hey, _hey,”_ says Simon against the back of his head.

And then Clementine Watson is there with another Zombie, putting themselves between him and the supervisor. Watson’s head is down and her voice comes out fierce, low, like it’s a knife she twists into his ribs. “ _Don’t._ Don’t, Walker, you piece of fuck, you’ll get us all killed!”

It was so easy, wasn’t it? It’ll be easy to do it to them, too.

And you can’t see Jem again if you’re dead, Kieren Walker.

Heartsick, poisoned, and feeling a lot like he’s just been stomped on, Kieren subsides.

“Jesus,” mutters the supervisor to nobody in particular.

The wind howls through the empty place where Freddie Preston had been standing.

 

*

 

The sun rises in January, its first appearance sleepy and pale, like it’s simply rolling over in between naps.

All through the month, and February too, the days lengthen. V-K Day passes without incident. The skies turn grey, then blue, then grey, then another shade of blue and another one after that, each color a little different, the limned halo of the sun edging just a little higher. Clouds skitter and stutter and chase each other around.

Out on the sea, you can hear the ice groaning.

It’s a cold morning in March, half-way through Lent and not long before Kieren’s twenty-first birthday, and he’s watching Henry Lonsdale sculpt a bubble beard down his chin while the others talk about what they’ll do as soon as K-science finds a cure for the blues.

The beginning of B shift means food for the healthy labourers and custodial work for the Zombies, so the cafeteria is booming, loud, and boisterous around them -- the prisoners are never as quite like themselves as they are when they’re eating, and Kieren supposes that’s true for most humans. 

You forget, when you don’t have to.

“Toast,” says Min Seong, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves. She lifts her head, nostrils flaring. “Can you smell that? That’s the first thing I’m going to do when I’m cured. Make up a whole batch of toast. And beans. And beans on toast! Toast triangles, fried eggs on toast. Scrambled eggs on toast.” Kieren can hear Ngozi’s voice in his head, scoffing, _You English have no imagination._ “Fried tomatoes on toast. Fried --“

“Henry!” Frankie’s finally noticed Henry’s work with the suds. She straightens up, the front of her labourer greys sloppy and dark with mop water. “Wash that off!”

Henry’s even added bushy white eyebrows, and he adopts a lofty expression, pretending to stroke his chin. 

“Young whippersnapper,” he says exaggeratedly. “I’m afraid I don’t --“

He cuts off into a yelp, because Frankie’s swung the mop. Its braided ends slap him right in the face, dashing his foam-white beard to bubbles.

Kieren and Min Seong exchange a look of long-suffering, and he passes her the roll of bin liners.

“It’s home I miss the most, though.” Her voice has paws that patter quietly under the racket. She shakes out a liner so that it balloons open. “That’s why I want them to cure us so bad. I just want to go home.”

“Leeds, right?”

“Right, Leeds. Have you ever been?”

He shakes his head. “We went to Manchester a few times, though. For school trips, and my best friend had a regionals match, and one time when Mum got us tickets to the opera. What’s that face for?”

“Nothing,” but her lips are twitching. He rolls his eyes back at her. “What about you? What’s got your name on it, then?”

Kieren shrugs. Everybody’s got something they miss like a hole in the heart -- fried tomatoes on toast and the first cup of tea in the morning, and trees, and the stupid fucking sun (they’ll say the opposite in summer, when the sun never sets) -- but he feels removed from all of it. Like the Kieren that came before, with his little sister and his mixtapes and his best mate, like that Kieren doesn’t have anything to do with the Kieren that’s standing here, in his shoes. 

He came back an entirely different person. Dead and alive again.

She passes him the full bag, he bins it while she fills in the new one, and they circle through the cafeteria, trailed by Frankie and Henry and the mop.

“I don’t know,” Frankie says, when Min Seong turns the question on her. “My family turned me in for the reward, so I don’t … really want to go back to them. So I don’t know where I’ll go.”

“You’ll come with me, of course!” says Henry instantly. “Mum always complained that I wasn’t a very good daughter, she’ll be glad to have you. You’ll stay with me, and -- _oh!_ We’ll find Rob. Remember Rob?”

“Not Rob Carnforth, who you swore you’d never say another word to because you caught him flirting with Danesha after you _told_ him you were going to make her a bracelet?” Frankie’s voice is withering.

Kieren exchanges another look with Min Seong.

Henry lifts his voice airily. “No, you must be wrong, I don’t remember that. Well, anyway, they sent him south when they sent us north, so we’ll find him again. Besides, I don’t think I ever _liked_ Danesha, she was just there, you know?”

Frankie’s eyebrows dart upward. 

Kieren becomes very interested in tying off the next liner Min Seong hands him.

“Now _Mara --“_

“Oh, pssht.” Frankie shoves the mop bucket into his shins. Brackish water goes everywhere, and Henry’s lovelorn expression dissolves into indignant spluttering. Kieren sighs and shakes water off his boots, and the healthy prisoners who are milling past them ignore them completely. It’s one of the few luxuries they get -- everybody looks down on inmates, sure, but at least the inmates get to look down on the people who mop the inmates’ floors. 

He makes the mistake, then, of looking at Frankie, who’s watching Henry laugh. There’s a weakness that’s shaking at the corner of her mouth, and something about it and the furrow in her brow and the slow way she blinks that makes Kieren pause.

 _Oh,_ he thinks with sudden recognition.

Oh, _no,_ Frankie.

Kieren’s crushes on boys as a child had been one thing -- he’d been secure in them, in a way, because up until Rick Macy happened, he never had to fear them being reciprocated. It must be another thing entirely, to be an _option_ without ever being an option at all.

“-- no, I’m serious, Mum sits down and watches a mystery every Sunday night,” Henry’s saying. “And there’s only so many times I can sit through Miss Marple, you know, you’ve got to come and help me out, okay -- okay, seriously, what’s going on?”

The cafeteria’s noisy, but there’s an element to the noisiness that’s becoming strange; it’s charged, buzzing, near-electric. This isn’t the usual morning bustle.

Now that attention’s been called to it, the four of them look around, trying to pinpoint the source.

There’s a crowd milling around the time-in clock, which isn’t unusual, and then a familiar profile materializes out of it.

“Mahmoud!” Kieren calls, and, “bully, he can’t hear me. _Mahmoud!”_

Mahmoud’s head turns, his gaze darting over the others’ heads and landing on them when Kieren waves. He lifts a hand in acknowledgement, backing out of the queue and coming over. He bumps fists with Kieren in greeting, and then -- because he’s Mahmoud -- does the same to Min Seong, Frankie, and Henry, and then pretends to blow on his knuckles to cool them down, like they were too hot for him.

“What’s --“ Min Seong starts.

“You ain’t heard?” His eyebrows go up. “Well, c’mon and see for yourselves.”

He takes them over to the notice board, which takes up a good portion of the wall behind the time-in clock. Kieren darts his eyes over it -- it’s full of things that are exclusive to the healthy labourers; reminders about monthly rollovers on ration cards that’ve been buried under newer pins, a completely full sign-up sheet for volunteers who want to trade a regular shift for a Bay shift (Kieren doesn’t know what that is,) a notice reminding inmates that the library and laundry will be closed in observance of Good Friday.

He lets his eyes drop. Dominating all of it is a new, red-lettered notice, dual-sided in English and Russian. As he reads, incredulity corkscrews tight inside of him.

“I don’t get it,” Henry says. “There’s no --“

“They’re looking for inmates who think they might be drift compatible,” Frankie states it baldly. It doesn’t make any more sense when she says it out loud like that. “Anyone interested is to report to the B-side common room after D shift on Friday.”

There’s finer print underneath, but they’re already being elbowed out of the way by the late arrivals.

They retreat back to the bins, taking Mahmoud with them and demanding an explanation.

“It’s an expedition or sumfin,” he tells them, holding up his hands to forestall their questions. “The bigwigs want to do something important out in the Bering Sea, and it involves a drift compatibility test like they had with the jaegers, you know. They want people t’sign up.”

“Expedition for what?” says Min Seong, at the same time Henry asks, “Why can’t they do it themselves?”

Mahmoud opens his mouth to reply to Min Seong, but then Henry’s words process. They all take a moment to frown at him instead, because it was the stupider of the two questions.

He grimaces. “Right, right, never mind. Expendability. Why do something yourself when you can make a labourer do it? Especially if it’s something dangerous.”

Mahmoud nods, and looks back at Min Seong. “It’s gotta do with the pumps, I think.”

Min Seong sucks in a breath between her teeth, sudden comprehension making her expression expand. Kieren darts a look at Frankie and Henry, glad to see them looking just as blank.

“Pumps?” he echoes. “What pumps?”

“The purification pumps.” Her voice is as quiet and clean as ice. “The ones that are supposed to clean the Kaiju Blue out of the Pacific Ocean.”

For a moment, nobody says anything, because she said it with such gravity.

Then Kieren decides to go ahead and point out the obvious. “They gave up on those, didn’t they? The ocean’s too big, too wide, too deep, too --“ Too everything. Purifying it on the kind of grand scale they’re talking about is impossible. Not only impossible, but expensive, too; they found that out in places like Yemen and Oman, didn’t they, where they were trying to desalinate seawater to make drinking water?

“Yeah,” Mahmoud agrees. “But think of it like the foreman’s thinkin’ of it. Everybody says it can’t be done, right? So what if we installed the first large-scale purifier? Us. Our rig.” He looks at their faces, one after the other. “They’d never call us the armpit of the PPDC ever again.”

As far as motives go, this is actually a lot more believable. Beside him, Frankie’s already nodding.

“But what does drift compatibility have to do with it?” Kieren asks. “How can they even test for drift compatibility? You need a PONs system for that, and all jaeger tech is intellectual property of the PPDC.”

He shrugs. “S’pose we’ll find out on Friday, tea-time.”

Kieren peers at him. “Are you going?”

“Me?” His eyebrows dart up. “Me, no. Brah, I only got one rotation left and then I’m _out_ of here. My time is up and I’m headin’ _home._ I’m not going to risk that for nothin’.”

Henry’s hand darts out, smacking Frankie’s shoulder. “We should try out! Don’t you think we might have a chance at it?”

Her brows pucker together with a frown. “It’s healthy people only, Henry. Why do you think they’re advertising it _here,_ and not on our side?”

“Oh.” He deflates. “That makes sense.”

A klaxon bell sounds, signaling the end of mealtime. Chairs scrape in every direction and the volume spikes as the inmates talk over it. The air still smells like burnt toast and steam from the industrial dryers. Mahmoud bumps fists with all of them again, and as the cafeteria empties, Kieren and Min Seong and the teenagers split up to finish their tasks.

Kieren keeps turning it over in his head.

The problem was that after years of watching the Jaeger Programme churn out these fantastic feats of engineering left everyone a little disillusioned with how streamlined technology could be. Jaegers could handle impossible depths, take impossible hits, travel impossible distances, but there aren’t any jaegers left. They’d died with the kaiju, and so the rest of the world has to muddle by with what it had before.

The amount of equipment it would take to install, activate, and maintain large-scale water purifiers all across the Pacific Ocean was daunting. There’s a reason the PPDC kept putting off any attempt to try it.

So if the Aleutian’s planning on doing anything, it’s not going to be at the grace of the Pan-Pacific Alliance. They aren’t going to be granted a single dime. 

It’ll be an illegal operation, backed by shady benefactors.

 _Interesting,_ he thinks.

Wheeling the full bin into the corridor, he almost runs right into Amy.

She snatches him by the arms before he can say anything, hauling him out of sight. She’d clearly been waiting for him to come out, and Kieren can’t help but smile at her, pleased that she’d risk being caught outside of her zone in order to talk to him. It’s like that summer he and Rick worked at the bowling alley in Lower Roarton, always dodging their superiors and ignoring tasks so that they could stand around and talk to each other, hoping there weren’t any customers.

“So?” she demands, her eyes bright. “Are we going?”

Suspicion dawns on him. “To what?”

“What rock did you wake up under, dumb dumb? The foreman and Phil and them -- they’re looking for jaeger pilots!” She puffs up, delighted to even say it, and her words come out of her quickly, almost tripping over themselves in their haste. “Makes you feel special, doesn’t it? It’s been forever since the world’s had any new jaeger pilots, and they could have come from anywhere, but it’s going to be _us._ They’re saying we’re going to make history!”

“Um,” starts Kieren.

She gives him a shake, showing all of her teeth in her excitement. “We’re trying out, right? You and me? Oh, it’s not even going to be a competition!”

“I don’t think we …” Kieren tries.

The smile falters a little bit. “What? You don’t think we’re drift compatible?”

“… can,” he finishes. The hurt look on her face deepens. “No, I mean, I’m pretty sure the offer’s not open to us. They don’t want anyone who’s got the blues. There wasn’t any notice in our rooms, were there?”

“Nobody’s _forbidding_ us from showing up, are they?” she demands.

“No,” he allows. “Besides …” He dredges up everything he’s ever been told about jaeger pilots, and everything he’s ever believed: after all, he’d had a poster of Coyote Tango in his bedroom growing up, same as every other English child of a certain age. In his memories, doors slam and Jem’s voice shouts, _Come on, Ranger, there’s movement in the breach!_ “Drift compatibility is, like … families. Family bonds. Married couples. Super-close relationships.”

The look she gives him is so incredulous he wouldn’t be surprised if her eyebrows tried to disappear into her hair.

She throws her arms out. “Mori and Beckett!”

Kieren gestures fruitlessly. “Yes, but that was -- !”

She holds up a finger. “Don’t,” she tells him. “Ever insult us like that again. We’re friends, Kieren Walker, that’s powerful enough.”

There’s a pause, then, the both of them still crouched down behind the bins.

“Remember,” she starts, when Kieren can’t find anything to contribute. “When I tried to get you to come to church with me that first time and you didn’t want to?”

“This isn’t the same thing,” he points out.

“Yeah, it is,” she says with the confidence of someone with months of new familiarity with him to back her up. “You’re still protecting yourself.”

 _When they came for me,_ Kieren thinks. _I thought they were going to shoot me in front of my little sister. I don’t want to be in that situation again._

Something in his expression must give him away, because she stands, straightening her shoulders like she’s making them as insurmountable as the Anti-Kaiju Wall.

“I’m mad now, so that’s it. We’re going.”

Kieren looks up at her and the expression blazing on her face. _Is this how you wound up in Manila? Did you want to? Or were there extremists who goaded you? Did somebody convince you that Dr Geiszler needed to -- needed --_

“Do you want to do this?” he tries, feeling helpless. “Shouldn’t you be lying low?”

She blinks at him. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” But he can’t shake the fear, swimming and shifting underneath his skin like melting ice. What if she draws too much attention to herself?

What if they find out?

 

*

 

Pentecost Memorial Treatment & Rehabilitation Centre  
Attn: Kieren Walker  
440 Halperin Road  
Norwich  
Norfolk NR17

 

_Kier,_

_Sorry it’s taken so long. I hope you’re still there. I hope you were even here to begin with. I have no way of knowing if this is the right address. I got it off Ken Burton from across the street. They sent him a notification of death and this is the address they sent it from, so I’m taking a guess that this is where they took you, too._

_Are you being treated and rehabilitated? ~~Are~~_

_I don’t know what I’m allowed to write. I’m assuming this is being read, on my end and on yours._

_~~It’s not paranoia okay it’s~~ **[scribble]** ~~I don’t like that they’re watching us~~ _

_~~this isn’t what we fought kaiju for~~ _

_I’m okay. Mum’s okay. Dad did okay while we were away. Didn’t burn the house down. He bought some stupid jeans, but Mum got out before I did (duh) and we think it’s okay if that’s the worst he managed when he was on his own._

_And don’t worry about me just because I’ve got a record now, you know me, never wanted to go to uni anyway, that was always your thing. Mum thinks it makes her a bit badass!_

_If you can get word to us, please do._

_You smell, by the way,  
Jem_

_by the way, do you know an Amy **[scribbled out]**? Her gran comes into the clinic for chemo and she thinks she might be one of you but she’s on the run. So please keep an eye out for her? Her gran’s keeping herself alive just to see her again. We all want you home._

 

**RETURN TO SENDER: RECEIPT INVALID**

 

*

 

When Kieren and Amy make it late after D shift on Friday, the room’s already packed: it’s like every labourer who could conceivably find somebody to drift with has done so.

Then again, events like this are probably a lot like how free cinema nights had been in Kieren’s rural hometown; you showed up because _everyone_ showed up, regardless of whether or not you had any feelings about an old Sundance film about Mongolian yak farmers.

A lot of the inmates are sitting in pairs, while others cluster together in amiable groups. The room buzzes with anticipation, and it’s probably Kieren’s imagination, but it seems like the volume spikes when he and Amy walk in, tellingly blue-eyed and wearing thin coats.

Amy must sense it, too, because she hesitates on the threshold.

It’s only for a second, though, and then she throws her shoulders back and strides into the room with what can really only be called a swagger. 

Kieren follows behind her. He doesn’t know how to swagger.

The first familiar face he spots is Pieter’s, sitting next to a man Kieren thinks is probably the racketeer he’d been arrested with.

“Hey.” He nudges Amy: there are two empty places to Pieter’s right.

They start towards them, but Pieter’s potential drift partner sees them approaching and curls his lip, and Pieter shifts his bulk over, deliberately making it so they can’t join them. He doesn’t meet their eye, and after a moment, when it becomes clear to her that standing over him and glaring isn’t going to shame him into relinquishing those seats, Amy shifts her weight backwards into Kieren, uncertain for the first time.

Somebody nearby snickers. 

It’s not a nice sound.

“ _Psst,”_ hisses a voice behind them. “Sit here!”

They turn around. A woman gathers up her coat and scoots one seat over, forcing her entire row to budge up as well. At the end, somebody whose name Kieren doesn’t know, even though they’ve shared the B shift since December, catches his eye and waves, and it’s as if the animosity of the moment before hadn’t happened at all.

“I’m Mara,” the woman who made room for them introduces herself. She looks younger than Kieren, which is notable because Kieren’s one of the youngest labourers on the rig, Henry and Frankie aside. Her black hair’s twisted back into cornrows, and something about the shape of her face makes him think she’s the same ethnicity Mahmoud is, although what that is, Kieren couldn’t tell you, and doesn’t want to embarrass them or himself by asking. Her gesture includes the bearded man sitting beside her. “And this is my boyfriend.”

 _Oh,_ Kieren thinks, as the pieces suddenly click into place. _Tough luck, Henry._

“I’m Amy,” Amy whispers back. “This is Kieren.”

“I didn’t know you guys were allowed.”

“No one said we couldn’t. If they didn’t want us, they should have specified.”

Mara’s teeth flash. She wishes them luck, and Amy beams back at her, leaning in and asking them what they think the test for drift compatibility is going to be like.

“In the Jaeger Programme, it was hand-to-hand combat,” the boyfriend volunteers, and he rolls his shoulders, adding casually, “I have a black belt.”

“And I can hold my own,” Mara backs this up.

Amy glances back at Kieren, her lips twitching. Mara and her boyfriend don’t look like the kind of people you want to take in a fight, mostly because you’d feel really bad afterwards. And neither of them want to point out that if it came to a test of physical endurance, a Zombie was always going to win.

Then her eyes slide away from him, smile freezing, just as a shadow falls over them both.

Phil Wilson clears his throat.

“Um,” he says eloquently.

Amy adopts a polite listening expression. Phil keeps standing there, and around them, conversations among the regular labourers slowly start to peter off. He’s dressed in grey, but it’s a different grey from the rest of them; his suit’s a steely, business grey, the collared shirt under it the same smoked color as a winter sky. He smells like detergent and his ears stick out and he doesn’t seem to know what to do.

“Yes?” Amy prompts him. “Can we help you?”

“Hi, Phil,” says Kieren weakly, and the sharp point of her elbow finds his ribs. _Don’t be so spineless,_ her clenched jaw tells him.

“Hi,” Phil responds. “This is … um … for -- ?”

“This is … the meeting for the volunteers for the drift compatibility test you asked for, right?” Compared to his, Amy’s voice is the clap of a bell, clear and carrying. “Isn’t that what this is?”

Phil blinks at them. “But you can’t,” he says blankly.

This is the wrong thing to say.

Amy straightens up like every vertebrae in her spine is locking into place, chin lifting regally. She fixes him with a cold look. Her eerie blue eyes are the brightest thing in the room, and Phil -- who is taller than most, broader in the shoulder than most -- shrinks a little in front of her, his mouth working like a fish’s.

“You -- your brains aren’t --“ he tries.

And this is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? This is why only the healthy labourers were asked to volunteer. How can brains that don’t receive signals of pain, comfort, hot or cold or hunger -- how can those brains send signals to a jaeger?

Amy’s nostrils flare. “Aren’t what? What aren’t we, Philip?”

“Well, you’re -- _blue.”_

She stares at him, and he looks back at her with an expression that Kieren doesn’t recognize until, suddenly, he does: it’s the same way Frankie looked at Henry in the cafeteria, wistful and wondrous and pained.

 _Oh, no,_ he thinks, in a completely different way, and it makes him scowl hard enough that Phil’s eyes dart to him, drawn by the movement. Kieren puts his hand on the back of Amy’s chair, his shoulder up against hers. If he surprises her, she doesn’t show it, and briefly, he wishes it were Simon here -- his are the kind of shoulders that could support whatever you put on them. 

But Amy had brought _him,_ not Simon, so she’d have to make due.

She speaks.

“Let me break it down for you. If you’ve asked us here tonight because you’ve got jaeger tech that you want us to test for you, may I remind you that that’s illegal? Also, you’ve asked for volunteers -- this is the Aleutian. Nobody _asks_ us, they _tell_ us, which means this is something dangerous that you don’t want to be liable for.

“So. Think about it,” she lifts a hand. “If you let Kieren and I drift, and we fail, at the very worst, you’ve got a couple fried Zombies on your hands. You probably won’t even have to fill out paperwork. Fry one of them --“ her gesture expands to include the inmates sitting around them. “Well.”

“ _Wilson!”_

They all jump, and somebody quickly hides their alarm with a cough into their fist.

The foreman’s standing at the front of the room, arms folded across his chest and an expression of distaste contorting the thin line of his mouth. His isn’t the kind of face you want to look at for very long; it’s too organic, too much happening in too small an area, bushy nose hairs and ruddy cheeks and wet mouth.

“Let’s get this show on the road already,” he hollers, and Phil Wilson scurries the rest of the way down the aisle.

Once there, he clears his throat and shuffles his notecards and says “um” several times in a row while the foreman looks impatient, but nobody in the audience cares: they’re all too used to Phil to even waste the energy being contemptuous.

“That was very brave of you,” Mara whispers to Amy. “He’s going to stick you at the top of the Wall for _months.”_

Amy shakes her head. “No,” she says easily. “I don’t think he will.”

Phil finally hits his stride. “Thank you, everybody, for coming. I’m pleased to see such a turnout, it’s really a credit to you all. You might be wondering what this is all about.”

“Ya fucking think?” shouts an inmate in the back. “Why are we here? Do ya got a fucking jaeger for us or not?”

“We do not,” Phil allows, and everybody shifts restlessly. “As Ms Dyer was kind enough to point out to us, that’s illegal. _But,”_ his voice cuts through the murmur, silencing it, and now he has the attention of every single person in the room. “We _do_ have a droid.”

 

*

 

For a little over two and a half years, the foreman of the Aleutian rig and his team of administrators -- hungry as they are for recognition -- have been systematically removing healthy labourers from the Wall to work on a secret project, funded by behind-the-scenes benefactors, the record of which would naturally slip between the cracks should anybody look closely. Kept separate from the rest of the rig in a locked-in hangar simply called the Bay ( _that explains the notice,_ Kieren thinks,) it came together slowly and carefully: a deep-sea droid that they were going to use to single-handedly activate a purification system and its auxiliary parts in the belly of the Bering Sea.

“There _are_ already functioning purification pumps, though!” Mara pipes up, emboldened by Amy’s previous outburst.

Phil doesn’t hesitate. “Yes, there are. But that’s in places like Japan and off the coast of L.A. -- where clearing out the Kaiju Blue is a commercial thing, not an environmental one.”

“Figures,” mutters Mara in an undertone. 

“Those pumps effect the local system only. We’re talking ocean-wide. We’re talking about bringing our seas back from the brink of extinction. Kaiju Blue does not degrade naturally, so we’ll have to remove it ourselves.”

Installing a pump at the continental level wouldn’t be difficult. Installing a pump at shelf level would be expensive, but also not difficult. At the deep-sea depths, however …

The technology for those kinds of dives exists -- the jaegers, of course, but there weren’t any of those left, and everything else was small scale. There were two- and three-man submersibles that could reach depths of 10,000 feet or more, but they were meant for exploration and scientific discovery, not industry, and industry-grade is what was required here.

“A droid of this size cannot be remote-controlled,” Phil explains. “And the precision and detail necessary to maintain something as complicated as a purification system …” He trails off. “That’s where you come in. Our droid needs a pilot. Specifically, it needs two pilots -- one to control the left hemisphere, one to control the right. For that, we need drift compatible pilots for our -- _not --“_ he looks pointedly at Amy. “-- jaeger tech.”

“They can call it whatever the fuck they want,” says Mara’s black belt boyfriend. Kieren and Amy look over, and find him grinning ear-to-ear. “But dude, we’re gonna be _Rangers.”_

 

*

 

“Names.”

“Amy Dyer.”

“Kieren Walker. That’s with an ‘e’ not an ‘a’.”

“Relationship.”

“Best friends,” says Amy.

“We grew up forty minutes apart from each other,” Kieren volunteers. “Lancashire County, UK. But we didn’t meet in person until last year.”

“Was this in Lancashire?”

“Lancashire County. And no. It was in Manila.”

“Ah, yes.” A pause, in which curiosity curls up like a well-fed cat. “Mr Walker, weren’t you in Manila the day that Dr Newton Geiszler was --“

“We both were!” Amy says sharply. “I was --“

Kieren trods on her foot.

“You can find everything you need to know about Dr Geiszler and Manila in my file,” he says, flat. He’s delivered this statement so many times it comes out by rote. “I was cleared of all suspicion in that incident, but my supervisors at Lamon Bay felt it was prudent to relocate me during the following rotation. Staying in the Philippines was proving detrimental to my productivity.”

“Right. Thank you, Mr Walker.”

And nobody, he notices, stops to ask Amy about the suspicion surrounding her.

 

*

 

In the end, fifty pairs are selected for the drift compatibility test.

They’re pulled from their shifts on the Wall for two days of testing, and looking at the reports, Kieren realizes that having a hundred people missing is almost a negligible amount when juggled right: statistically, they could disappear and the numbers wouldn’t even look that strange.

It’s one thing to be aware of your own expendability, it’s another thing entirely to see it in practice.

No wonder none of them noticed the healthy labourers getting pulled to build the droid in the Bay.

“I’m still mad about that,” he mutters. “How long have I been here and _not_ known?”

“You don’t like meeting new people, handsome, so this stuff is going to pass you by. Also, shh.”

The B-side common room has been transformed overnight. The fold-out chairs where they’d all sat and listened to Phil Wilson outline their futures are gone, replaced by a soaring and motley collection of scaffolding, spare piping, and broken cement blocks, like some modern-art idea of a child’s jungle gym. There are racks of weights against the back wall, next to a bucket of long bamboo poles. It’s this last thing that most of the other labourers are eyeballing. They’ve all heard stories about the Kwoon, the rooms in the Shatterdome where potential jaeger pilots would fight each other.

There are a lot of people around. Not just labourers, but other people Kieren supposes he knew worked on the rig, in a vague way, but had never paid attention to. 

It makes for a lot of clothing in the room that isn’t grey: technicians in headsets and navy shirts, a few administrators looking overdressed in their business attire, and some people who must be scientists, though Kieren’s really only basing this assumption on their white coats.

Amy leans into his ribs. “Maybe I was wrong -- maybe _this_ is where washed-up K-scientists go to die.”

He snickers, and it ceases to be funny a half-minute later, when a white coat spots them and promptly breaks off from the rest.

“Hiya,” he says, and Kieren, of course, checks behind him to make sure he’s not talking to somebody else.

Next to him, Amy lifts her chin, like a scientist’s undivided attention is her due.

He introduces himself as Dr Oliver Black, which is convenient, because his flat scrub of jet-black hair is the only noteworthy feature about him. A woman trails two steps behind him, her head down so that Kieren’s first impression of her is just the part in her hair, her white coat, and colorless legs ending in the ugliest square-toed brown shoes he’s ever seen. She’s Dr Nina Abdullah, her companion tells them, and the part bobs a little in acknowledgement.

“We just got here,” says Oliver with a lot of teeth. “Came for the weather, of course,” which is such a bad attempt at a joke that Kieren and Amy can’t even bring themselves to laugh out of politeness. With blind cheeriness, he continues, “Since they’re giving you the chance at this, we might as well make a study of you while you do it. Two birds, one stone, all that.” 

Kieren looks at the straight line of his teeth and thinks, _you kill the birds with the stone, you know._

“They get their thing, and we get to better understand your condition. After all, we want to cure you, right?”

Amy darts a look at Kieren. What scientist could possibly drop everything to come to the most remote rig in the entire Pacific, just to study a pair of Zombies under shady conditions?

Blacklisted ones, that’s what.

Kieren looks from one to the other, trying to decide what they could have done to get booted off the PPDC payroll, when Nina’s eyes dart up to take a peek at them.

Their eyes meet.

The noise Kieren makes is completely involuntary, like stubbing his toe or getting a paper cut -- high and stifled, and Oliver stops talking and Amy glances at him sidelong and for a beat, everyone just watches him curiously.

“Sorry,” he mutters, and then, not looking at Nina at all, “What does being an experiment entail?”

“Oh, no, no,” blusters Oliver quickly. “Nothing of the --“

“Please, Mr Black. I’m from Norfolk.”

“Doctor,” Oliver corrects, less patiently, and his mouth thins further when Amy murmurs in a placating way, _right, sure, of course you are._ “And I think you’ll find that rumors of what happened at Pentecost Memorial have been greatly exaggerated by the media. They’re baseless --”

“Mr Walker’s file does contain medical records from Norfolk, Oliver,” Nina interjects, addressing the floor. Her voice is as small and ready to duck its head as the rest of her.

“Oh,” says Oliver. “Well, then, maybe you might … but it can’t be that bad, right?” He attempts lightness, like Norfolk is hilarious in hindsight. The fact that the situation is grossly actual to Kieren and not purely hypothetical doesn’t seem to occur to him. “I mean, I heard they were pretty hasty, but … good thing you can’t feel anything, right?”

Kieren sticks his arm out just as Amy steps into it, her eyes blazing and blue. 

If it were Zoe, he thinks ruefully, Oliver would already be a smear on the carpet and she’d be standing over him, saying, _You want to know what I feel? Immense satisfaction._

Oliver just blinks from her to him, guileless, like, _what did I say?_

And then, on the other side of the makeshift jungle gym, Phil Wilson lifts his voice and the room turns to give him their attention.

With everyone distracted, Kieren takes the opportunity to steal another look at Nina, and finds her looking back.

He hadn’t been wrong. Her eyes are uniformly colored brown in the way of cheap contact lenses, and the whites of her eyes have a strange, marbled look to them. They’ve been bleached. It’s the kind of thing that would merely be unsettling -- unless you knew what you were looking for.

Unless you knew what someone hiding the kaiju color of their eyes looks like.

She sees the expression on his face, and darts a finger to her lips. Shh.

He nods. He thinks of Amy sitting beside him on the tram, saying, _Those of us who need to find the cure are the ones barred from it,_ and for a moment is overcome with a stinging envy, that Nina Abdullah can hide out among the healthy still, a wolf among sheep, a lizard among mammals, and find a way to be both Zombie and scientist.

But then it drains away, and all he’s left with is admiration.

How she must _work_ at hiding it, every minute of every day. How afraid she must be, all the time.

“-- not training you for combat,” Phil’s saying. “This isn’t the height of the jaeger era. We don’t need to stick you in a Kwoon and have you club each other like monkeys with sticks. We are putting you in this droid to _work._ So we need to see you work.”

 _Ah,_ Kieren thinks, and looks again at the jungle gym. _Right._

The tasks they’re given are basically the same thing they do up on the Wall, only indoors and above mats. There isn’t a labourer among them who isn’t confident while balancing on precarious scaffolding or leveraging heavy tools out over empty space, so as the morning wears on, the mood grows almost festive and the tasks seem like fun: carry this drill to the top of the tower, fetch a cinderblock from the pile sitting on a scale that will tip unless you replace the block with something of equal weight, assembly-line construct a funnel.

“All right,” says Phil, after every pair has gone and only two were disqualified, leaving forty-eight cheery pairs of labourers looking at him like, _what next?_ “Do it again. This time -- blindfolded.”

“Oh, shit,” says Amy audibly, and a murmur races through the crowd.

They look at each other, uneasy. How can Zombies, who feel only the most rudimentary sensations, climb over a labyrinth of planks and bars without being able to see what they’re doing?

Because of time constraints, half of the pairs will run through today, and the other half will go tomorrow.

The teamwork, which had been effortlessly maintained on the first run-through, begins to fall apart almost immediately.

“ _Nyet,_ you fuck!” Pieter bellows, stretching his arms out. His partner, comically, is holding a bucket slopping full of water out over empty space several feet away, his arm trembling with the effort of keeping it aloft. “I am over here! Follow my voice! _Hey --”_

The bucket slips and clatters down through the scaffolding, soaking the floor.

“Thank you!” calls Phil. “You’re out!”

“Why blindfold both of us?” Amy murmurs out of the side of her mouth. “Wouldn’t it be a better test to only blindfold one of us? That way, the blindfolded one can show how much they trust their partner to be their eyes, and the unblindfolded one can show how good they are at directing the other?”

“I don’t think it’s that,” says Nina in a mousy way. Oliver had stepped out to find something to eat while they waited. Nina, of course, doesn’t have to. “Well, not entirely. It’ll be very, very dark where they’re sending you. I think they want to see that you can handle it, should something happen with the droid’s lighting.”

“… that’s comforting,” says Amy dubiously.

Oliver returns, crunching on a biscuit from their rations with an expression of immense dissatisfaction. They stand and wait, watching as, one-by-one, the labourers fail.

A few come close, but by the time Phil calls out, “Dyer and Walker,” ten pairs have gone and not a single one has completed all the tasks.

Kieren and Amy tie each other’s blindfolds. 

Nearby, somebody mutters, “do you think being a lizard is an advantage? Can they echolocate or something?”

“That’s bats you’re thinking of, Harold, thank you,” Amy calls back. Then, dropping her voice for Kieren’s ears only, she says, “Seriously, though, handsome, make a lot of noise.”

“Do you want me to sing like Henry?” he offers dryly.

A pause. “You know what, if it helps.”

He swallows. Nobody has to say it, but Kieren and Amy aren’t under the same scrutiny that the rest of the inmates are. Whether they succeed or fail right here won’t be a testament to their success or failure as Kieren Walker and Amy Dyer, but a testament to their whole species. They’ll need to be better than the healthy labourers. They’ll need to be _exceptional,_ or else every Zombie on the rig will be written off.

So they turn away from each other and walk to their starting points.

If they’d turned off the lights in the room, that wouldn’t have been a problem; night vision was one of a Zombie’s strengths. But the darkness on the inside of the blindfold is muffling, and when the toe of his boot catches on the mat, he nearly stumbles.

Phil calls, “Begin!” and Kieren takes her suggestion and starts singing.

 _First came Trespasser in the San Francisco Bay,_  
_then came Hundun all terrible and grey …_

It’s the first thing that popped into his head. He and his sister used to play hopscotch and jumped rope and chanted it out, one verse after another, while Rick beat out in time. They weren’t allowed to sing it at school, which of course meant that nearly every child knew it by heart.

He closes his hand around the first rung, positioning his feet, and there’s a pause after he finishes the first line where he thinks he might have picked something Amy doesn’t know, but then she lilts up into the second line and he pinpoints exactly where she is. He starts climbing.

_Kaiceph dropped on Cabo like a scaly atom bomb_  
_and Scissure came and ruined all that lovely Sydney calm …_

It isn’t hard to keep a spatial awareness of Amy, he finds. The whole structure shivers every time they move, sending vibrations that even Kieren can pick up through his dead skin. And they might be playing a sillier version of “Marco, Polo,” but it’s working.

A few other voices try to join in, and somebody hushes them.

Soon, the only sounds in the room are Kieren and Amy climbing, and singing.

She finds the bucket, and he swings across the monkey bars to take it from her. She shimmies up the structure so that he can heft it back to her and she can pour it through the funnel they’d all laughingly built on their first run-through, remembering their clumsy classroom science experiments.

She goes to hang the bucket on its hook, and that’s when it goes wrong.

They’ve reached Yamarashi’s fight with Gipsy Danger, and suddenly Amy’s song cuts off into a breathless squeak.

A labourer yelps, horrified, and then Amy’s weight _bangs_ into the structure. It quakes, and quakes again as she kicks and tries to find purchase. She scrapes at a plank as she falls, and Kieren doesn’t think, he reacts.

Hooking his legs around the railing he’s sitting on, he braces himself and flings his arms out towards the sound.

Amy hits his outstretched hands, and she twists, nails digging into him heedlessly as they try to get a grip. The force of it bends his spine, and he lets it, swinging her like a pendulum so that she slams into the railing underneath him. She regains her balance and slaps her hand around until it hits his boot, and together, they pull her up, where they sit there and pant.

Scattered applause sounds out from below, seemingly involuntary. Nobody else had caught their falling partner.

“Do you still have the bucket?” he demands.

She hits him in the head with it.

“Good,” he says.

Her hair slithers noisily across her coat as she cranes her head back, sightless. “Can we reach the top from here?”

“Suppose we better hope we paid real close attention on the first climb,” says Kieren, with confidence. “But first, the hook.”

 

*

 

By the end of the second day, there are only two pairs still remaining:

Kieren and Amy, and two brothers who grew up on the sea of Okhotsk.

They don’t say much. Kieren personally finds them very intimidating. They’ve got the look of people who don’t mind murder, disembowelment, and the polite exchange of minor internal organs on the black market.

(Kieren might be exaggerating. Okay, Kieren is probably exaggerating. He doesn’t know what people who don’t mind murder, disembowelment, and black market organ dealing look like. The brothers were probably incarcerated for looting or rioting or having questionable political opinions, just like everybody else.)

One is short, square in the shoulders, and he possesses a truly formidable amount of facial hair. The other is concave in the chest and probably at least two heads taller than his brother. They were introduced at the beginning, and as the pool of potential pilots thins, Kieren asks them their names one more time. The pronunciation completely passes him by, but after the second time of asking them to repeat it, he just nods like he gets it and hopes he won’t ever have to speak to them or about them. 

In his head, he thinks of them as Gimli and Legolas, which is rude, but it sticks.

“Well,” the foreman descends to take a look at them. “This is interesting.”

His eyes track from blue-eyed Kieren and Amy to the Russians and back again, tongue wetting his already damp lips. Phil Wilson stands deferentially at his right hand side.

“Suit them up,” he declares. “Let’s see how they do in the drift itself.”

 

*

 

They’re sent away at that point, while the people who don’t wear labourer greys calibrate the drive suits to their specifications.

Mara, who scrubbed out with her boyfriend early on the second day and doesn’t seem particularly bitter about it, steals Amy away as soon as they’re dismissed: they’d found out earlier that they’d read the same fantasy series as kids and it’s _vital_ that they discuss it. The author, apparently, had died during the Kaiju War without ever getting a chance to tie up the final cliffhanger.

It leaves Kieren at a loss.

It’s too early for Henry and Frankie to be back from shift, and when Kieren finds Mahmoud, he’s embroiled in a game that seems entirely too vicious and bloodthirsty to be played with squishy foam balls like it is.

“I must have a poor understanding of what football is,” he remarks dryly, when Mahmoud ducks out of bounds to come say hello. “I imagined it rather differently than this.”

“Don’t be a blue about it, tea-time,” Mahmoud snarks back, all teeth. “This is dodgeball, the _other_ great American sport.”

On the court, somebody slams a foam ball into somebody else’s face with terrific force and is fouled for it. Mahmoud looks pleased -- his teammate, however, tries to fix the frames on his glasses and begins looking distressed when they prop up crookedly on his ears.

“Played it in high school a lot, but Wonder Woman suggested we bring it here,” Mahmoud explains.

Kieren blinks, derailed from his thoughts about tomorrow. “Who?”

“You know,” he gestures. “Your friend.”

When Kieren keeps looking blank, he clarifies, “The Queen of England. The Amazon. Y’know, most likely to cut off her own breasts and then cut off my dick for dessert?”

It clicks.

“ _Oh!_ Zoe?”

Mahmoud snaps his fingers. “Tha’s the one!”

Somebody stops sprinting across the court to shout at Mahmoud to get his ass back in jail.

“Fuck you, where d’you think we are?” he bellows back, then smiles sidelong at Kieren. “You gonna join, brah?”

Kieren waves him off. Team sports aren’t his thing. He’s good with oil paints, and he’s good at being alone, and he’s made a habit of saying no to every invitation thus far. He’s swimmingly nervous that if he changes his mind, he’s going to do something stupid, like fall on his face or fall irrevocably into friendship.

He leaves the rec room, heading back towards the Zombie side of the garrison. It’s not that different: fewer toilets, is all, no library and no cafeteria.

He turns the corner, and stops.

Simon Monroe is leaning against the wall outside his door.

His eyes track absently from one person to another before snagging on Kieren, and he straightens up, arms dropping to his sides. He’s all labourer greys and blue clerical collar, and Kieren fights the urge to check over his shoulder and make sure there’s nobody more important coming up behind him before he approaches.

“Amy’s not here,” he tries, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“I know,” drags out of Simon. His mouth skews wryly to one side. “I’m here to talk to you.”

Okay, now Kieren’s alarmed.

“Well,” he takes a beat to recover. “You might as well come in, then.”

The room Kieren shares with seven others is identical to every other room off this corridor -- male Zombies on this floor and the one below, female Zombies on the next two up. Each room is no bigger than a train compartment, four bunks on each side, and everybody’s forever stepping on each other’s feet and kicking each other in the head and complaining when coats and trousers get left in the middle aisle.

He steps inside, holding the door open so Simon can follow.

Almost everybody else is still on shift; all the bunks are empty except for Ian Kugler’s. His is directly above Freddie Preston’s bare mattress. He might have been using the seclusion to pray, but now he’s deeply involved, his red-checkered kuffiyeh askew on his shoulders. Kieren spots the familiar block lettering on the cover of the crime thriller that Chuckles blackmailed off a healthy prisoner last week. They’ve been passing it around their bunks like illicit schoolboys. It didn’t matter what everybody’s literary tastes are; they’re all hungry for it.

He looks up, blue-eyed, and goes, “All right, Kaz?”

And Kieren says, “Yeah, Ian. You?”

“Yeah. I’m at the part where Hughes finds out about the counterfeit kaiju bone powder.”

“Oh, man,” Kieren sympathizes.

Ian widens his eyes knowingly, finger unconsciously curling at the corner of the next page, eager to turn it. “Simon.”

“ _Salaam,_ Mr Kugler.”

As he sits down on the edge of his bed, he realizes he has absolutely no idea what to offer next. He’s in the company of somebody’s friend without that somebody present, and awkwardly, he spreads his hands in a _what_ gesture, wishing feebly that Amy would somehow materialize. Simon’s easier to take when Amy’s acting as buffer, fixture in his life or not (“we call that _friendship,_ handsome, I don’t care if you’re allergic,”) and Kieren could always take his cue from her.

The mattress complains when Simon sits down next to him, caged in by the frame of Chuckles’s bunk above. He folds his hands between his knees. 

Too low for Ian to hear, he says, “Kieren, you should reconsider being their pilot.”

It’s immediate and hindbrain, his desire to scowl and say, _no, I don’t think I will,_ but it’s also a childish reaction: that part of him that doesn’t want to give slimy, salesman Simon the satisfaction of anything. Simon, who is also probably the only person Kieren’s ever met who’s as earnestly people-oriented as Amy. 

His brain keeps sending him mixed signals.

Instead, he schools his frown and lifts his eyebrows, trying to be polite. “You should really talk to Amy.”

Simon nods, not arguing. “I know. But she won’t listen. Or,” he corrects, closing his eyes. “She would, but it would -- she’d --“

He stops, and the tension in Kieren’s back eases away with his surprise, because he doesn’t have to ask what Simon means: Amy can be talked down from the things she wants to do, but she holds grudges about it. The fact that Simon’s unwilling to risk Amy’s animosity endears him to Kieren a little bit; someone who holds Amy’s feelings in that high esteem is someone Kieren likes on principle.

Simon’s eyes come open, his expression serious. 

“Look,” he says, his voice dragging of him like it’s got a corpse wrapped in a rug. “This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to make pilots out of us.”

Whatever Kieren was expecting, it wasn’t that. 

“Excuse me?”

“They’ve tried it before. The whole thing -- the deep-sea pump, the droid. It was years ago -- which perhaps is why they’re trying again now. Almost everybody who was around the last time would have shifted out of rotation. Now it’s all fresh new faces. Can’t remember what you’ve never experienced.”

“And you?”

“This is my second rotation on the Aleutian,” Simon tells him, wry. “I cause too much trouble elsewhere.”

“Yeah, that’s … the first word that pops into my head when you’re involved.”

His eyes crinkle in the corners. 

Kieren smiles back, and asks, “What happened?”

The amusement slides right off Simon’s face like ice coming off a sheet of glass. He stands, filling up the narrow middle aisle, and glances up and around, his attention lingering briefly on the personal details that surround everybody’s bunks -- gouges in the wall, a calendar with a classic car on the current month, Chuckles’s scrap-metal troll hanging by its neck from the post, Kieren’s train map. His hands fidget at Kieren’s eye level, tapping at the tops of his thighs.

He looks around one more time before turning back to Kieren.

One-handed, he flips the tab on his clerical collar, pulling it through. Left to its own devices, it still curls to the shape of his throat, and he drops it onto the bunk at Kieren’s side. His hands go next to the catch of his overcoat, fishing the zipper out from underneath. 

The sound of it unzipping seems indecently loud.

“Hey,” says Kieren, with growing discomfort.

Simon sheds the overcoat, revealing an even greyer jumper on underneath, with thick, wool cables spiraling down his chest. He pulls that up over his head, too, and the movement drags at his layers of undershirts, giving Kieren a glimpse of the very white skin that’s under all of it.

“ _Hey,”_ he says, more insistently this time.

Simon gives him a flat look that simultaneously says “oh, spare me” and “calm down,” neither of which Kieren plans on doing.

Another moment -- which he spends once again wishing Amy were here -- and then Simon Monroe is shirtless in front of him.

Kieren sits there, feeling uncomfortable and ridiculously aware and fighting the urge to lean around Simon’s body to check and make sure that Ian’s seeing this, too, because _what._

Obstinately, he tips his chin up and makes eye contact, and Simon looks back at him for just a shade longer than is comfortable.

Then he turns around, and every thought flies out of Kieren’s head.

He opens his mouth, and “Jesus _Christ”_ trips involuntarily from it.

Working on the Wall, he’s seen a number of frightening wounds: Zombies are, after all, sent here to work themselves to death. That’s their punishment for being too similar to the kaiju, for being the _result_ that everybody wants to pretend doesn’t exist because the Kaiju War is over. He’s seen bold, black stitching holding somebody’s guts in. He stapled Freddie Preston’s arm together himself.

From the nape of his neck to the dip in the small of his back, Simon’s spine lays flayed open like someone had visions of gutting a fish.

On either side of the black, curled-up skin and the yellowed wink of bone, pinpricks gouge his flesh. They look like eyelets for shoelaces -- wait, no, more like bite marks. They flex as Simon moves his shoulders, and the wound grins at him with crooked, blue-blooded teeth. It knows perfectly well how terrible it is.

“Fuck on a stick,” comes from Ian’s direction.

“I don’t know how much you know about the mechanics involved in piloting a jaeger,” Simon starts. “But in the drive suits, there’s a membrane at skin layer that, when you lock your helmet into place, fills with a type of plasma. It’s this plasma that transmits your movement to your jaeger’s. It’s called a Relay Gel, and it’s expensive, and not easily replicable after the PPDC shut down the Jaeger Programme. So when they tried to copy the jaeger pilot system here, they did away with it.” His voice is low and horrible. “They underestimated its significance.”

Kieren makes the intuitive leap. “You were one of the first test pilots.”

“I was,” Simon confirms, turning around again and fishing his shirts out. He starts to reassemble, piece by piece. “There’s a spinal clamp in the drive suit.” 

Dazedly, Kieren nods. He vaguely remembers the costumes they sold around in the shops when he was a kid. The spinal clamp, then, was just a weird line of foam that caught him in the back when he and Jem dived through Clive Furness’s hedges; a nuisance, nothing more. 

Simon’s mouth twists, self-deprecating. “I wasn’t tested twice.”

The implication turns wintry in Kieren’s throat, and he swallows around the aridness of it. “What happened to your drift partner?”

Confusion puckers together the skin between Simon’s eyebrows, and then clears.

“Oh,” he says. “No. They were testing single pilots -- the hope was that the droids were small enough that a single-pilot system would suffice. It was cheaper and cleaner, too. Now their ambition has expanded -- they want drift compatible pilots.” He smiles at the idea, near fond. “I consider myself a man of many talents, Kieren, but drift compatibility is not one of them.”

“It can’t be --“ Kieren starts, but stops, because what does he know?

“As children, we all dreamed of being Rangers.” Kieren nods again. Clive Furness’s hedges an insurmountable wall, Jem’s voice waking him up, calling him to arms as if going to school required the same kind of bravery as going up against a kaiju. “But actual drift compatibility is rare. Most people can’t do it and never will.”

He turns that smile, then, on Kieren.

“But,” he adds. “Some people are special.”

It’s Kieren’s turn to flick him an “oh, please” look.

Simon’s expression crystalizes, becomes a glass-like thing, untouchable and so easy to shatter. “They won’t expect Zombies to be able to drift. They won’t be ready for you at all. Talk to Amy, _please._ Let somebody else --“ he catches himself, and Kieren looks down quickly, blinking like sand had been blown into his eyes. It sits strangely on the bed beside him, the idea that Simon had been about to suggest that somebody else take Amy and Kieren’s place -- somebody else who means less to him than them.

 

*

 

“Oh, his spinal injury?” Amy nods. “I’ve seen it.”

“I --“ Kieren blinks at her, scandalized. “When did you see Simon naked?”

She barks out a startled laugh. “I’ve never seen him _naked,_ handsome. Who brought up being naked? It certainly wasn’t me. Is there something you need to --“

“ _Stop._ I didn’t -- we’re not talking about that.”

The expression on Amy’s face could be more Chesire-like, but she’d have to try pretty hard.

“Aren’t we? You could have fooled me.” He makes a pained face at her, and she laughs again and takes pity. “No. I _have_ seen him shirtless, though. I know what you’re talking about.”

“So you know why we should back out. Let the brothers take the risk. And maybe not even that; we could talk to them.” And anyone who tries to go after them, but that’s -- that’ll be exhausting. And what’s voluntary now might _stop_ being voluntary if nobody volunteers. “We could …”

He trails off. 

Amy’s not meeting his eye, and he knows from the way she fidgets that she’s already made her decision. 

He takes a moment to look her over -- somebody must have done her hair this morning, because it’s tightly braided up close to her scalp, like a crown. (Ngozi, probably. She’d been part of his rotation, coming into the Aleutian last year, and she likes doing hair. She’s from a small town, she said, where Mali borders Nigeria, and in the way it does, a toxic amount of the Kaiju Blue managed to sink into their well-water, thousands and thousands of miles from the closest kaiju kill site. She was the only one she knew who turned Zombie; everybody else died. Somebody told Kieren once that the reason she loves doing hair so much is because it’s the only part of her home she’s managed to bring with her, and there isn’t a lot she and Kieren and Amy have in common besides being from Atlantic nations, but the Atlantic-born have to stick together, because you can sure bet that the Pacific-born are doing the same.)

Like everything else they’ve ever worn, the drive suits are grey, made of hard, protective plates over black nylon, cushioning the expandable lining that will fill up with the plasma derivative, exactly as Simon said. The metal collar keeps catching Amy in the chin; he can see where the helmet will clip in.

He doesn’t feel like a pilot. He mostly just feels silly, dressed too awkwardly to move easily; like he and Jem in costumes all over again, like kids wearing cardboard armor. Or like that time they did a nativity play in the second year, and Kieren had to be the back half of the camel that carried Mary and Mary’s Mrs-Lancaster’s-embroidered-throw-pillow-pregnancy into Bethlehem. 

Amy darts him a look. 

“What are you smiling about?” 

Surprisingly, they’re being left alone. A few technicians in headsets and navy shirts keep slipping by, but nobody’s trying to hustle them anywhere. It’s almost like they’re being respected; Kieren’s not used to the feeling.

“Camels,” he answers, nonsensically. “All this work, and it’s still just basically fitting two people under a giant felt camel costume. Again.”

Her eyebrows scrunch down together. 

“You’re the important half,” he assures her, and she is: she’ll be the right hemisphere, they’ve already decided.

She puts her hands out, tugging at the catch in his breastplate and drawing him in close to her, so that his whole world is nothing but her face and her eyes, lifted that small distance to his.

“I don’t want to give this up yet, han-ney,” she tells him, and it’s a testament to how flustered she is that she tries to call him “handsome” and “honey” at the same time, and winds up with a mushed-up mix of the two. She grimaces, tugs on him a few more times to gather her wits, and tries again. “Let’s wait and see, please? Maybe they’ve worked the bugs out of the beta trial. It’s not in their interest not to.”

Amy, he knows without being told, doesn’t want to give up the chance to be an influence. They’re so close to doing something _groundbreaking_ for their kind, and she won’t pass that up. Not for all the threat of dismemberment and mutilation in the world.

And really, if he’s honest with himself, if he thought it was going to work, he would have convinced her to give it up _before_ they put on the drive suits.

She must read the acquiescence in his face, because she bounces up onto the soles of her feet and kisses him flatly.

“I love you, Kieren Walker,” she tells him, heartfelt, and Kieren, squirming and pleased, mutters back, “oh my god, Amy.”

It isn’t until later, when impersonal hands are fitting nodes against their skulls and someone’s approaching with the spinal clamp and Kieren could not, _not_ get any tenser, that she jolts forward and says across to him --

“Hold up, when did _you_ see Simon naked?”

He’s still laughing when Phil starts the countdown.

 

*

 

*


	2. II: Jaeger

*

 

*

**PART TWO: JAEGER**

(Jäger, ˈjɛːɡɐ, German : hunter)

*

 

*

 

The drift is blue, blue, terrifyingly blue, and Kieren is flung into it like Gary Kendal has him by the meat of the shoulder.

There’s a sensation of plunging downwards, and he flings himself out, trying to stop his fall, but there’s nothing to catch his hands or his feet on. Everything’s insubstantial, and he’s too heavy, too weighted. There are rocks in his shoes, and so he plummets.

Blue rushes by him in a kaleidoscopic twirl. Blue sounds batter his ears. 

He opens his mouth, but there’s too much blue in his throat, too much blue -- blue --

\-- kaiju-blue --

yelling horrible monsters with teeth and glowing glowing _kaiju-blue --_

\-- and from nowhere, a hand suddenly reaches out, grabs him, and yanks him upright.

“Woah!” Rick sounds out laughingly, and Kieren is eleven years old, the tarmac on Lark Lane needs resurfacing, and Rick has just gotten a pair of trainers with the roller blades that pop out. He’s officially cooler than Kieren -- again -- and Kieren’s almost used to it. “Close one, mate! Lucky I was here, eh? Eh?”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, I was _fine,”_ Kieren insists, eleven and twenty all at once, and he suddenly realizes he’s still holding onto Rick’s hand with -- not with the desperation of someone who’d almost fallen down on the tarmac, but more like someone clinging to the edge of a cliff.

Rick just gives him a tolerant grin. “Sure ya’are.”

Embarrassed but reluctant for reasons that baffle the eleven-year-old and ache at the twenty-year-old, he lets go, and the world tumbles on.

It’s quieter this time, and he has more a sensation of being upright, of moving _forward_ and only being a little off-balance, like he’s stolen Rick’s roller-blade trainers. He rushes on through the blue, passing memories like they’re familiar spines on a shelf in a bookstore --

\-- school and the dark terror of the whitewashed facility in Norfolk, Jem with missing teeth leaping onto his mattress and bellowing, “Get up, Ranger, there’s movement in the breach!” --

\-- and Freddie Preston twisting the wedding ring on his finger, and his horrible blue-glowing maw --

\-- and a school with all girls and Nan handing over a Mars bar with a finger to her lips, _our secret, Amy-bee,_ and a rooftop in London and the pinpricks of light reflecting off Delilah’s dizzying, beautiful eyes, and the weight of love sunk like a stone in the stomach -- 

\-- and Simon ducking his head right before he grins, and the blue-black gape of his open spine --

And then, abruptly, it all stops.

He lands on his feet, and everything flares around him, technicolor, lit from the inside out and sunken with the depth of two minds remembering the same event from two different angles. It is -- of course -- the City of Flowers.

_No,_ he thinks, helplessly.

Dr Geiszler stands up in the sanctuary, his arms spread wide in a come-at-me gesture that makes him look crucified, his tie a skinny strangled line down the front of his chest. The microphone in his hand rings with the force of its own feedback, and everybody responds at once. The faces lined up behind Geiszler -- the university dean, a PA, and other official-looking people Kieren doesn’t know -- remain impassive, which only makes Dr Geiszler look more comically animated.

“Am I right, Manila!” had been his last words. “Or am I _right?”_

The City of Flowers yells back at him. The sound of it shivers into the rafters of the cathedral. Somebody shouts, and somebody shouts, and somebody shouts something else, and --

Four gunshots sound out at once.

Stained glass breaks, punched-through, and spills into the sanctuary. The cacophony of shattering glass on marble swallows everything else, and Dr Geiszler drops straight backward, his triumphant expression turned to pulp.

“Jesus _Christ!”_ yells Kieren, jerking his eyes away too late, and his voice gets lost in the sudden pandemonium.

The whole crowd surges backward in horror at once, like gunshots are contagious, like murder is something that can be caught. He looks up, instinctive, but of course he has no idea where the shots came from -- anywhere, everywhere, all of them suddenly murderers and potential victims at once.

A half-dozen people in suits converge on Dr Geiszler, and that’s the last he sees; an elbow in his gut drives him down, and a knee catches him in the chin, and it’s a mob. A crowd’s become a mob.

_Where’s Amy?_ he thinks, distinctly, but that can’t be right: he doesn’t know Amy yet. They were strangers, here. 

He does, though. He knows her, and you can’t unknow someone once they’ve been in your life. You can’t unknow someone back to how you knew them yesterday, or a year ago, so even in his memories, he knows who she is, sees her, and recognizes her; everything about Amy is stained with the knowledge of her. He loves her here, and he has yet to meet her.

Hands descend on his shoulders, hauling him up.

“Come on,” says Amy, whose name he will not know until it turns December in Alaska, three years from this moment, and three years from here, he will be able to catch her blindfolded. Her voice is low, and urgent. “They’re going to check everyone for a pulse, so we need to get out of here!”

He looks up at her, and since it’s her memory, too, he _knows_ it and realizes it at the exact same time: it hadn’t been her.

One of those gunshots had not been hers.

He couldn’t tell you when he first started thinking it: in the City of Flowers itself, maybe, when they were on the run. Maybe he’s thought it this whole time. 

It had been a simple, insidious idea, that perhaps his life had been saved by an assassin.

Nothing dissuaded him from the notion, so it became fact in his head: Kieren Walker has lied from day one to protect Amy Dyer with the big skirt and the flowers in her hair, thinking she was one of the unknown Zombie extremists that killed Dr Newt Geiszler.

But she isn’t. Amy had been just like him: a kaiju-creature in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Victim.

And since it’s her memory, too, he sees what she sees: himself, hiding behind ill-fitting contacts with his hood pulled up nervously far, and to Kieren he looks stupid and young, but Amy doesn’t look at him like that. Amy looks at him with fizzing affection. 

He sees black uniforms flooding up from the back of the church, spreading towards the exits to block the fleeing people.

“Oh,” she says, mournful, and they stand there, clutching each other’s arms. Her skirts are brown, the lace under them dingy with age and hard wear, and her cardigan is the brightest sunflower yellow, the color made near-nuclear with how strongly Kieren remembers it. Flowers cascade from her hair like shards of glass, and she sees herself the way he sees her for the first time: a whole wealth of a city-cemetery in a girl.

“Oh,” she says again, craning her head around to find an alternate exit. “Oh, they’re going to hate us forever.”

“Who?” Kieren shouts above the noise, but he knows. Of course he knows; if someone thinks Zombies assassinated one of the most famous K-scientists of the war, then not a single person will rest until every last one of them is captured, detained, and strung up on the useless Wall to go feral and die. If someone thinks Zombies were behind the murder of Dr Geiszler, then there’s a ticking clock on all of them.

Amy grabs his hand. Her skirts swing, and they pelt sideways, slipping minnow-like through the crowd. 

They’re aiming for the side door -- churches, bless them, have a lot of them. They slam through, passing through a hall of vespers, their shoes overloud and the candles in scones on the walls trembling with the vibrations of the whole church shuddering around them.

They tumble, hand-in-hand, into the blue.

 

*

 

“-- success! Pilot-to-pilot connection confirmed!”

“Oh, _thank_ g -- Amy! Err. Um, Ms Dyer? … Mr Walker? Do you copy?”

“There’s no odd readings from their vitals, sir, but that doesn’t mean anything, I mean -- there are no vitals at all, so I don’t know --“

“Yes, thank you, I get it.”

Kieren opens his eyes. The world blurs, bright blue and distorted, and it takes him a moment to realize it’s the HUD hovering in front of him, shifting with the movement of his helmet. His teeth set together. Why couldn’t they have come up with some other color for that; a casual, calming lilac or something?

He looks through the display ( _I don’t know who they think they’re fooling,_ Amy thinks, _this is absolutely recycled J-tech,)_ and sees Phil Wilson hovering over a console. Technicians fan out on either side of him, and a clipboard dangles, half-forgotten, from his free hand.

Kieren meets his eyes, and --

In the next second, has a stunning recollection of him naked. 

“Oh my _god!”_ he yelps, hands instinctively leaping for his eyes to cover them even though there’s no point, and he whirls on his copilot. Phil _Wilson?_ Are -- 

“-- you _serious?”_

“ _Hey!”_ Amy snaps back, matching him indignation for indignation. After all, until a moment ago he thought he was drifting with one of Dr Geiszler’s murderers; he can feel her anger about that simmering, looking for an opening to turn pointy and deadly. “Don’t you judge me!”

Kieren’s known Phil longer than she has, though. He’s completely spineless!

Amy’s face contorts, because that’s her decision to make, thank you very much.

In the corner, Nina Abdullah sighs and shades her face, and Kieren carefully looks at her and then at Oliver and everywhere but at Phil, who has _freckles_ in places Kieren doesn’t need to know he has _freckles,_ Jesus _Christ._

“Er. Guys?” Phil tries, in a not-at-all commanding tone. Then, to the technicians with him, “What comes next?”

“Calibrating the suit, sir,” says a Filipino woman at his elbow in a tone of saintly patience. She catches Kieren’s eye and grins -- before the interviews, she’d been teasing him about how badly he’d let his Tagalog slip. 

“Right,” says Phil gamely. To Kieren and Amy, he asks, “Are you -- ready for that?”

_Let’s flip him off,_ Amy suggests, and their arms are half-way through that synchronized motion before Kieren cuts it off, _Let’s not,_ and so the movement of their arms becomes an awkward little wave. Amy doesn’t think, _you moron,_ so much as she feels it, and since she’s feeling it, he feels it too. They both stand there, doubly embarrassed, and already trying not to laugh.

“Right,” says Phil again.

 

*

 

That’s the last night they spend in the garrison.

Nobody tells them this, though, so after Kieren has scrubbed the nodes’ sticky residue from his skin and heads back to his bunk, he finds it empty, the mattress stripped down to bare plastic, all his belongings removed, and Ian Kugler in the bunk across looking at him like he’s got two heads.

“I have no idea,” is all he says, when Kieren gestures at him in askance.

From behind him, the tall and thin Chuckles says, grave, “You’re in the other building now, Walker.”

“The other …” He glances around at the sets of blue eyes watching him back. His bed looks like Freddie’s -- there won’t be anybody to fill it until the next rotation comes in in June. “Wait.”

He feels like he’s being stupid. He probably is, but there’s a routine his body’s used to; it’s in his skin, and his skin thinks he should be in bed now because he’s got B shift in the morning, but there’s no bed and since there’s no bed, he has no idea what to do. Kieren Walker isn’t sitting in his skin right: they took him out, didn’t they, flung him into the blue, and once something’s taken out of its packaging it never goes in quite the same way again, does it.

Weirdest of all, he can still feel Amy. They’re out of the drift, but she’s still there. It’s like when they’d been in the not-a-Kwoon, blindfolded, and her every movement sent a vibration through to him. Somewhere in the world, she moves, and it reverberates back to him.

Then:

“Kieren Walker?” He looks up. “Yeah, rotter, you, you’re with me.”

His spine stiffens. A Wall supervisor stands in the corridor, a thick red man in a beige carhart and an expression on his face universal to every former bully who’s grown up and found himself in charge of a whole bunch of people who can’t fight back, like he doesn’t have time for this. It’s not the same supervisor who kicked Freddie Preston off the top of the Wall, but he grits his teeth anyway. 

The Russian brothers are with him, and they look as weird as Kieren feels, like they zipped up their bodies wrong.

He looks back at the small room and the people in it, says “bye” kind of helplessly, and follows the supervisor.

He takes them across the rig, to the building where management lives; the foreman and the supervisors, the technicians and K-scientists. On a rig like the Aleutian, where prisoners and Zombies can move freely while off-shift, careful programming on their ID chips keeps them out of important places, so Kieren’s never been in this building before. Having spent the last three years living cheek-by-jowl with labourers, he’s surprised to find that the living quarters for the higher-ups only seem to take up two floors. Same grey hallways, same cheap lino patterned to look like fireworks, and way too few people. 

He glances over at the Russians; Gimli looks back, clearly thinking what he’s thinking -- they forget, sometimes, just how many _more_ labourers there are than there are people who control them.

“You’ll be living here, till they’re done with you. They’ll be checks on your identity chips, ‘course,” Big and Ruddy tells them, with the firmness of someone who enjoys disappointing other people. “So don’t be getting any ideas about going anywhere you ain’t supposed to, got it?”

“Da,” say the Russians, passing a droll look back and forth. Prisoners, first and foremost.

“You two,” he points out two doors utterly indistinguishable from any of the others. “The lady’s in that one,” the next door, “and that one’s you,” the last door on the end. With a cheerful, “don’t fuck this up,” he strolls off down the hall, intentionally making two women in bathrobes with shower caddies in their hands step smartly out of the way.

The three of them stand there for another beat, looking at the four -- four! -- rooms that are now theirs. Legolas says something in an undertone to Gimli, who huffs out an incredulous laugh and mutters back. None of them know what to do.

The last time Kieren had a room to himself was solitary confinement in Norfolk. He swipes his ID chip over the doorknob, wonders what he’s going to do if it doesn’t work, and lets himself in when it flicks over to green. He makes out a bed, a bar with several hangers on it over the radiator, a chair, and a sliding partition that has just enough room for a toilet and shower if he thinks really small thoughts. All his belongings are balled up on the mattress.

He looks at it, then backs out and goes next door.

For a moment, there’s nothing but dark, and then two glowing blue eyes appear from underneath the blanket.

“Oh, thank _god,”_ says Amy when she sees it’s him. “Get over here, I’m never going to sleep, nobody warned me that normal people are so _noisy.”_

“Are they?”

He climbs over her to take the spot against the wall: Amy, he knows, likes sleeping on the left side, and Kieren hasn’t shared a bed with anyone since his parents suggested he and Jemima were getting too old for it, so it’s fine, how she immediately settles into place around him.

“ _Yes,”_ she whispers, more or less to his nose. “They’ve got a cafeteria on the level below -- it’s _so loud!_ How can people eating be so loud? And don’t get me started on the toilets. God, I think the world’s ending whenever anybody flushes! Who needs to piss that much?”

Kieren thinks about it. “What’s that book Nan used to read to us? ‘Everybody Poops’?”

“Yeah, but now _we_ don’t, so who’s superior here, huh? At least we’re quieter and can get some bleeding rest.”

She’s right, though; it probably has to do with the piping and how close together the rooms are, but every time a toilet flushes, it jolts them right out of sleep, one first and then, inevitably, the other.

What they do appreciate, however, is the sudden seclusion.

Being zipped back into their bodies wrong, they’re both raw, strangely oversensitive, and the new sounds aren’t helping. He couldn’t imagine having to do this with the other labourers coming in and out at all hours.

This day, and the next, Kieren and Amy keep trying to unstitch their memories, ripping at the seams of their new connection, trying to sort themselves out into two distinct people again, but it’ll be a fruitless task: their minds were fused together in the drift, whole parts of themselves overwritten with the other, and separating them now is impossible. 

He _knows_ his bedsheets weren’t powder blue as a kid, he knows he didn’t have to sleep with tubes in his nose because the doctors were afraid his oxygen levels might drop too low while he was sleeping, but he cannot, for the life of him, remember how he _did_ sleep. Amy liked watercolors; she liked those little tins that you ran under the faucet and the coloring books that came with them, and Kieren liked oil paints, liked to stay after school in the art room until the groundskeeper came through and said, “I’m locking the door now, dear,” but by then, football practice was over and he could walk home with Rick, kicking loose stones back and forth and enjoying each other. Or was it the other way around; Amy liked hiding in the art room after last bell so that she could avoid everybody who bullied and harassed her? Or was that both of them?

There’s a woman in London named Delilah Doolittle, and she’s never laid eyes on Kieren Walker before, but he’s kissed her on a rooftop, finished food off her plate, stuck his cold toes against her calves in the middle of the night, and loved her so much he felt swollen, punched-up with it, like he kept a place for her inside his ribs and she’d expanded to fill all of it, so that all his organs felt small and pinched, trying to rearrange around her. 

He wakes up whenever the Russian brothers flush next door, and for a moment, can’t remember who he misses more; Delilah or Rick.

They report the next morning to the ready room, where they’ve relocated the PONs system and the supplies; the iron weights, the bamboo poles. Phil’s team watches from behind observational glass. The room’s size is puzzling, dwarfing the equipment in it, and Kieren smells the cold, stagnant scent of seawater and realizes they must be above the Bay, and the droid they haven’t seen yet.

On the second day, on the third, then the fourth after that, pilot-to-pilot systems initiate, a neural handshake is formed, and Kieren and Amy fall into the drift together. 

It remains stable, again and again, without fail.

On the fifth day, Kieren crosses the rig back to the garrison and finds familiar faces off-shift in the rec room, playing “proper” American football. All of Kieren’s friendships have been accidental things, so he sits down and shakes his head at the labourer who waves him in. One of these days, he figures, the invitations will stop coming.

After a half-hour of watching, Henry Lonsdale switches in and Mahmoud switches out, coming over to drop next to Kieren on the bleachers. Sweat stains his underarms and the band around his head, and he doesn’t say anything for a long moment. After Henry’s incessant babble, it’s a nice change.

He takes a long gulp from his canteen, then says, “The Russians fell out of alignment yesterday.”

Kieren closes his eyes.

“They’re back in our rooms, and we’ll see them on the Wall again tomorrow.”

“I feel bad for them,” Kieren says quietly. Creating an absolutely calm space between two minds is hard, and the Russians have been angry since the day they were born. Most labourers are, but in the drift it will feed itself until it explodes.

Mahmoud braces his arms along the bleacher step behind them, and studies him.

“Nobody knows what to do with you, tea-time.”

“Yeah, well …”

“You weren’t supposed to be able to do it.” It’s as steady as walking, the way he says it. “Zombies aren’t human enough to drift. Now look at you.”

Kieren avoids looking at him, because the expression on his face is openly admiring.

“Live long enough,” he says. “And you see all sorts.”

“Brah. That’s the plan,” Mahmoud answers, smiling. He’s twenty-four, and he’d wanted to go to Idaho for college. Except when the Kaiju War made the coasts unsafe, wealthy Americans abandoned their beach homes and relocated inland, filling in the unsettled west and driving up the costs of living in places like Mahmoud’s Montana hometown. The people who lived there suddenly couldn’t afford to live there anymore, and a lot of them, like Mahmoud, wound up arrested and punished for doing what they had to to make due.

On the sixth day, Kieren and Amy are taken out of their single rooms and moved down the hall from the ready room. It puts them further away from living people, into a room where they can bunk together. Literally -- there are bunk beds.

Phil shows it to them, then grins and says, “Kinda reminds you of a Ranger’s room, huh?”

They fix him with a look, and he vacates quickly.

Phil Wilson has been skittering out from under Kieren’s eyes a lot, and Kieren supposes that yes, he’s been doing a lot of uncomfortable staring, but he’s living under the nervous assumption that the more he drifts with Amy, the more he’s going to start finding Phil’s broad shoulders attractive.

But either the drift doesn’t work like that, or Amy’s feelings aren’t strong enough: so far, he’s been perfectly capable of seeing Phil as a spineless sycophant with bad ears while at the same time knowing, in an academic way, that he gives fantastic --

“Hey!” Amy balls up his bedding and shoves it into his chest. “You get bottom bunk, handsome.”

“Do I get a choice?”

“No. I’m right hemisphere. Right hemispheres are dominant hemispheres.”

“Oh, _shut_ up!”

All he gets in response is a view of her backside, disappearing over the edge of the top bunk. With the noise of a man going to war, Kieren drops his bedding and gives chase, planting his foot on the edge of the bottom bunk and levering himself after her -- she’s waiting, of course, and catches his chin in her hand as soon as it appears. He struggles, but she puckers his mouth up like a fish’s and murmurs, “ _Sooo_ handsome.”

Kieren makes aggressive eyebrows at her, and she laughs, letting him go. She throws up her arms in time to block him attacking her with her own pillow.

When he wakes up that night, it takes him a moment to realize it’s not because somebody next door’s had a bodily function and the pipes need everybody to know about it.

It’s Amy in the bunk above.

She’s crying.

Immediately, he rolls out of his messy bedding and fumbles for the ladder, movements sleep-heavy and slow. She tries to hide her face, but it’s useless; the dim, nighttime glow from their eyes reflects off the sheen on her cheeks, and burying her face in her pillow doesn’t make him unsee it.

Eventually, her voice pokes its head out and demands, “Did I ever meet Rick?”

Abruptly, Kieren remembers the weight of his own grief -- he’s carried it with him everywhere, like rocks in his pockets and pebbles in his shoes and heavy bracelets on his wrists that catch at his hairs and there was nowhere to put it down, so he kept on carrying it. He’s used to the weight, now, and for a moment, he’s so incredibly sorry that it’s hers now, too.

He braces his arms on the bedspread and lays his chin on the backs of his hands. A moment later, she flips over and scoots closer so that they can touch.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he says quietly. Somewhere in the dark above them, he feels the shape of their family tree: their parents, their sister Jem, their nan Dorothy, and all the people who came and carved their initials into the bark without care. “You know him now.”

 

*

 

It rained that day.

You could tell it was going to; the sudden way the wind changed and the clouds thickened, casting shade all down the slope of the valley and turning the heather dark. The sirens go off that morning, and Kieren’s mother is still rattling off their precautionary measures when she goes outside to fetch the post.

She comes back in with a long, flat envelope and a look on her face like she’d been blinded.

Kieren peers at her with his mouth full of eggs, one hand reaching for his fork because his sister’s going for the last triangle of toast, and catches sight of the crest for the Liverpool School of Art and Design. His stomach promptly flapjacks.

“Hold on,” goes Jem, their hands frozen over the toast, near-act of violence. “Holy shit, is that --“

“ _Language,_ Jemima,” their mother snaps, and she extends the envelope to Kieren. “Feels heavy, love.”

The acceptance rate to Liverpool is actually very reasonable -- it _is_ Liverpool, and it is wartime -- but it doesn’t stop Kieren from feeling like sulfurous, firework-like, and like the king of the world when the word _accepted_ slides out in front of his plate. It makes him feel like he’d conquered hundreds of other applicants in competition for this single spot. There’s a welcome brochure and a page of remarks on his essay, which he reads the first lines of before he stops, not wanting to know if criticism follows.

He embraces his mother, spinning her around, tries to hug his sister but gets his shins kicked by her heavy boots for his trouble, and goes out into the hall to call Rick.

“Are you kidding me!” Rick hollers, and Kieren laughs. “Of course you got in, you great berk, what, you thought y’wouldn’t? I’ll beat yer head for thinking that! You know what this means, yeah? Get your skinny arse down here and we’ll make a day of it.”

And this, he’ll think later, is the best thing Rick ever gave him: that moment of completely selfless joy, when he didn’t think about his mother or father eavesdropping and knowing he was talking to Kieren. He didn’t think.

He dances around his sister on the way out, and she grabs him and kisses his cheek in congratulations -- “emotional whiplash much?” he complains, pleased, and she grins at him and tells him, “I ate your toast” -- and his mother calls out after him, “Mind the rain, Kieren!”

“Down here” is actually the end of Lark Lane, because Kieren’s banned from the Macy house for being completely flaming (“you’re not _flaming,_ mate,” Rick tells him defensively, and when Kieren just gives him a look, corrects himself, “you’re more like one of those battery-operated tea lights that girls use, en’t you? Just … glowing, a bit,” and Kieren rolls his eyes and sticks out his foot to trip Rick into the shrubs.)

Rick whoops and hollers and comes at him as soon as he comes into view, flinging his arm around Kieren’s shoulders and yanking him into his side. 

“How you doin’, then?” bellows out of him, his chest expanding into Kieren’s ribs in a way that makes him feel sulfurous all over again. “How’s it, your first day as a college student?”

“I’m not one _yet,_ Rick,” Kieren shoves at his head, and off they go, down into the village proper where Rick charms a bottle of White Lightning off Pearl Pinder while Kieren waits by the bins outside the Legion (he’s banned here, too, for being … glowing, a bit,) and then aimlessly about, stopping first to share the bottle on the station platform until the ticketmaster comes and shoos them away. They take the shortcut across the hills that Jem and Kieren always use to get to the Lancaster’s in Upper Roarton.

The wind changes, the clouds thicken, and, oblivious, they cross into the shadow of the woods just as the sirens go off again.

Rick stops laughing. He looks at Kieren, gone suddenly pale under the flush of alcohol.

Kieren stares back -- confronting, for the first time in their lives, the reality of being caught out in the rain without shelter. They don’t have the context yet to understand how threatening the rain is -- neither of them have ever seen a dead body, and nobody’s survived exposure to the Kaiju Blue, not yet -- but their imaginations do a good job of making it worse.

“The cave,” Rick says, and Kieren contributes, “oh god,” and they pelt into the trees.

The woods are completely silent around them, making their unsteady crashing seem twice as loud. Pheasants and foxes, burrowing bugs and birds don’t need sirens to know to hide when the rain comes. Animals, he thinks, don’t need a name for the kaiju to adapt to them.

“Why did today have to be a toxic day?” Rick snarls. “Of all -- _fuck!_ \-- bloody fucking days!”

Their last toxic day had been months ago; there wasn’t always enough contamination in the rain to kill, which was good, because he hates to think what would happen to people who live in monsoon countries.

“Take it up --“ he pants, “with the people who killed all those kaiju and -- ow, ow -- and left their body parts strewn -- everywhere.”

“ _Fucking_ Rangers,” agrees Rick, smashing a branch out of the way, and Kieren remembers to duck before it smacks him in the face on the rebound. He’s got more leg than Rick does, but Rick did sports. “Weren’t fair, were it. Didn’t -- didn’t even have the gall to finish the fight fairly.”

How does he have the breath to complain about the Jaeger Programme and run flat out at the same time?

“Robbed the rest of us when they claimed victory, didn’t they? Shoulda been all of us. Instead, it was -- _there!”_

They plunge downhill and across the ravine, where the mouth of the cave props open in the rock face like a snoring man’s. 

They grab at each other, half-hauling each other the last few strides. They dive into the opening, laughing, bright and heady with relief and adrenaline and a dozen other things. The rain, landing in the litter behind them, sounds like a sigh.

“You’ve got --“ Rick starts.

“So do you!” And, for a silly moment, they both dance in place and furiously shake themselves off, dashing water droplets out of their hair and brushing at the damp tiny pinpricks of rain on their clothes. Then they look at each other, and burst out laughing again.

“What’d’ya reckon?” Rick asks. “Think we’ll die slowly and miserably?”

“If I die first, tell your dad he’s welcome to spit on my grave. It’ll make him feel better.”

Rick’s brow furrows. “Don’t say that,” and he’s right, it isn’t funny.

For an hour or more, they crouch in the cave and watch the rain -- it falls, heavier than the usual English rain and intent, and cuts rivulets in the ground and puddles by the cave mouth. It doesn’t look contaminated, but then again, Kieren isn’t a K-scientist and it’s interesting, anyway, to think that this is the closest he will probably ever get to a kaiju unless he visits a city-cemetery or somewhere where they’ve got preserved bits on display.

“You gonna find yourself a new best mate, then?”

The voice startles him, and Kieren darts a look over at Rick. “If you get me _killed,_ yeah. I refuse to die by rainfall.”

“I meant in college, Ren, ya tosser.”

“ _You’re_ the tosser, what are you on about, new best mate. You’re my best mate. I have in it writing and everything.” Rick’s brow puckers again, puzzled, his face shaded in the half-light, and the light bulb goes on just as Kieren clarifies, “Postcards are legally contractually binding, you know. You can’t back out of it.”

They share a grin, but Rick isn’t deterred. “You’ll be in Liverpool, mate.”

“Right, and you won’t be far, ‘cos you’ll get into a great program for engineering, won’t you?” Rick looks down, but Kieren doesn’t have patience for his modesty, and continues on. (He’ll regret this, later. Kieren Walker knew that Rick Macy could do what he damn well pleased, but he’ll understand, later, that Rick Macy _didn’t_ know. He didn’t even know he could look past his own shadow.) “Besides, this is the 20’s. I heard we’ve got phones now. You could learn to use one.”

“All right, _now_ you’re being a tosser,” and he pitches himself across at Kieren, who yelps and fights back mostly for the form of the thing.

When the sirens sound the all-clear, Kieren stands and beats the dust off his jeans.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll give it about five minutes before my dad realizes we’re not at any of the shelters and brings the whole town out looking for us.”

“Good man,” Rick says noncommittally, peering out into the woods and then upwards, where the clouds have obligingly paled again. There’s a peculiar wilted look to the woods when there’s been a toxic rainfall.

He doesn’t move.

“What, is the puddle too big to step over, then?” Kieren leans up against his back, prodding him forward. “Do you want me to put my coat down so you can --“

Something uphill gives way.

They both look up at the sound of splintering, just as a torrent of rainwater comes spilling through the lip of the cave mouth.

“ _Fuck!”_

Rick leaps forward and Kieren careens backward, but it’s too late -- there’s water drenching under the collar of his coat, in the corners of his mouth, in his _eyes --_

“Shirts!” he has the presence of mind to yell, and Rick yells something back, but Kieren’s caught with his arms twisted up over his head, having tried to remove all of his layers at once, and misses it. With a lot of struggling and failing, he manages to get them off, and frantically checks the damp patches on his jeans -- but no, the water had mostly funneled off his head and shoulders.

Muttering “fuck, fuck,” in helpless litany, he pats himself down and then looks up, and finds Rick staring back, his hair darkened and wet and his eyes enormous.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, are you --“ _Dying? Are we dying? Is this it?_

They stand there for several long moments, each one of them unblinkingly watching the other and nervously scraping at themselves -- Kieren separates his shirts and uses the driest one to towel himself off, rubbing at his hair before offering it to Rick, who does the same. His left eye stings. He tries not to rub at it.

“What do you suppose death by Kaiju Blue feels like?” Rick wonders at length.

“Right now, it just feels cold,” Kieren complains. And, “you’re not popping up in boils or dropping to the ground and seizing. Am I?”

“Yer all over in gooseflesh, I can see it from here.”

“Thanks,” says a now very self-conscious Kieren.

They wait a while longer, their panic edging a little bit further away with every minute that ticks by without either one of them keeling over in horrible death throes. Rick is even considerate enough to stop staring at his bare chest.

“It might take 48 hours, yeah?” Kieren asks. “Death’s not always immediate?”

“You got me.”

They wait.

“Do y’suppose that was even rainwater?” Rick squints up the rock face, “… it might not have been toxic enough to get us, if it weren’t.”

“Look, I don’t care. I’m freezing. Give me my shirt back, and don’t let your dad spit on my grave, okay?”

His shirt’s still half-dangling from Rick’s hands, so he grabs at it, not quite meeting his eyes, and almost takes Rick’s jacket with it. Rick just looks at the side of his head for a moment before he promises, “I won’t,” and it’s so sincere that Kieren darts a look at him and finds him squinting and half-showing teeth.

“Shut up,” says Kieren for absolutely no reason. “Dick.”

More teeth appear.

“Oi, I’m a dead man walking, Ren Walker, you be nice!”

“You’re _fine._ We’re both _fine,”_ say it enough and it’ll be true. “Come on, there’s a shelter by the Legion, isn’t there, and all shelters have to have those special showers for morons like us.”

“Right,” and Rick starts reassembling, too.

They grimace together as their damp clothes cling wetly to their skin, and promptly start shivering, teeth quaking inside their heads. Kieren, being the one wearing more layers, reels Rick in close as they start uphill, and doesn’t think about his arm in Rick’s ribs or anything; he’s this physically aware with everything, it’s fine. He’s been like this with Rick for so long it doesn’t even register as something to get nervous about.

“What am I s’posed to do, once you get out of here?” It’s quiet, stretching its grasping arms into the space between their bodies and no further.

Kieren swallows.

“Not get caught out in toxic rainfall, for one,” he offers.

“Damn it, Ren.”

Kieren tilts his head up, away from their feet, just as Rick shifts his head around to face him, his jaw setting. Awareness flares all the way to the ends of Kieren’s fingers, which flex in the fabric of Rick’s shirt.

Rick’s mouth pulls, slightly, his eyes darting from Kieren’s eyes to his mouth and back -- they’re on the same page, then.

Kieren doesn’t kiss him.

He doesn’t kiss Rick Macy that day, because it’d be unsanitary and very likely to get them poisoned, and also because he thought he’d have another chance, and another chance after that, and all the chances the rest of their lives could think to give them. Tomorrow, maybe, or Wednesday, or a week from today, or in months, when Kieren was eighteen and living in student housing in Liverpool and there wasn’t a single soul with a shotgun around. God, Kieren was going to kiss him _forever._

It doesn’t matter, of course, because the next day, Rick’s gone. To Preston, apparently, for boot camp, and then wherever the PPDC sends him after that.

He never does learn the cause of death, if he got sick or went mad or if he just plain got killed. It’s not like Bill Macy tells him, and when he steals moments with Janet Macy by the loos in church every Sunday after that, that’s not what they talk about. 

By then, of course, an outbreak of feral cases in the city-cemeteries has driven the PPDC to ask that anybody demonstrating “kaiju-like symptoms” to please seek medical attention immediately. On television, Dr Hermann Gottlieb says, “it’s either a very peculiar psychosis, or the kaiju are trying to resurrect themselves in us,” and Dr Geiszler says, “what, like zombies?”

“It’ll be all right, son,” Kieren’s dad tells him.

“But maybe it’d be best if you stay inside for awhile,” his mum adds. “Just until they figure out what this is about.”

Kieren looks back at them, his eyes blue, blue, luminescent and kaiju-colored, their old color shot to pieces and completely bled away, like maybe if Kieren went looking he could still find the splatter, murder marks the spot; here in the sand of the Afghanistan from Bill Macy’s stories, here on the rocky coast of San Francisco Bay, here in the cave where Rick tried to say good-bye and Kieren didn’t let him.

 

*

 

Amy tilts her head up so that she can watch him, her temple propped into his ribs. Kieren’s scrunched up between her pillow and the wall in a manner that would be uncomfortable if he weren’t what he is, and the lower bunk is occupied only with their clothes, in all their shades of grey. 

The clothes will stay there for a few more days yet, until Kieren and Amy are comfortable sleeping apart.

“Well?” he asks her.

She skews her mouth, and the movement of her head against him dislodges her headband: he removes it for her, looping it around the bedpost.

The way she’s lying on top of him is making it hard to breathe, so he stops, for now.

“I,” she says, and casts around for the words. “My nan was … they told us she had six months, and _I_ had six months, and my nan said she didn’t want to do chemo and my -- my -- Delilah, she … well. I was living with her in London when she decided that I wasn’t. I was.”

She stops, and starts again.

“So, I,” and she meets his eyes, and just like that, he knows that she hasn’t told this story to anyone, not even Simon. “I went for a swim.”

 

*

 

On the seventh day, one week after Kieren and Amy first stump the people who thought themselves experts on what Zombies could and couldn’t do, they change out of their drive-suits and leave the building, crossing the rig back towards the garrison.

It’s warm today -- that morning, when they’d reported to the ready room, it was to the background sound of the technicians who kept pulling each other outside to demonstrate that their breaths _weren’t_ misting in front of their mouths for the first time in seemingly forever. Oliver had stood to the side while Nina positioned Kieren and Amy’s spinal clamps, and every now and then he let loose a sigh of satisfaction, like he had something to do with the weather being nice. 

The ice at the very tops of the towers has been forced into retreat; frost glistens in sun-blushed patches.

As they walk, Amy slings her arm through his.

Their steps match up, synchronized. Neither of them notice.

She’s telling a convoluted story about a memory that’d almost tripped them up in the drift, and by this point it’s expanded to include an anti-kaiju medication specialist who was terrified of needles, three mutant catfish, Simon’s singing, and the labour camp daycare for the healthy, incarcerated labourers who had small children.

“Where was this again?” Kieren’s still trying to unravel it.

“Simon and I came from the camp off Colombia,” she answers. The drift, a lot of the time, skips the specifics, so why Kieren could tell you about the white-hot panic that obliterated Amy when the head hunters bust down her hotel room door, he couldn’t tell you _where_ it occurred. He knows the exact heft and weight of the glass that Amy threw at Delilah’s head after Delilah said, _I think it’s time we went separate ways, babe, you’re dying and I love you too much to bury you,_ but he’d have to ask her if that was in their kitchen or their bedroom or a fancy restaurant. “Because not _all_ of us got immediately sent to the Aleutian after getting caught in the City of Flowers.”

“I’m talented,” he answers dryly. There’d been two camps between the City of Flowers and the Aleutian, but neither of them had been in the South Pacific.

“That’s one word for it.”

He levers his shoulder against her and shoves, football-style. She rebounds, laughing and catching his hand, using it to pull herself back into his side. Healthy labourers pass by in the other direction, and when they spot Kieren and Amy’s joined hands, they draw together so that somebody can whoop anonymously from the center, “Ooooooo, Zombies in looooove!” and somebody else asks, “if you can’t feel nothin’ when you do the nasty, what’s the point,” and the rest of them holler and laugh.

“Where did the catfish come into this?” Kieren asks, lifting his free hand to high-five the last of the labourers as they go by. 

Their taunts are the tamest Kieren’s ever been on the receiving end of; a side-effect, he thinks, of getting to know each other.

Growing up, he heard a lot of things about black Americans, brown Americans, black and brown American prisoners, Russians, drunk Russians, and drunk Russian prisoners, and very little of it has anything to do with the people he now lives with.

“The camp at Gorgona was also a commercial catfish farm,” Amy answers promptly.

“Right.” He blinks. “Of course.”

She laughs. “Rich people would pay to make sure that the fish they were eating weren’t Pacific-raised. So to make money on the side, the foreman had us work in these giant pens, raising catfish to sell to, like, Mississippi or whatever, where they would then slap a different label on _swearing_ the fish were certified Gulf-raised, and sell it inland.”

Kieren takes a moment to be overwhelmed by the ingenuity of opportunistic capitalism.

She taps the side of his head. “Here’s an image for you, handsome: Simon in overalls. And fish guts.”

He yells, because of _course_ he has a memory of that and didn’t know he did until this moment, and she throws back a laugh so loud it rings off the ice between the buildings.

They turn up the steps towards the garrison doors. C shift just finished, so they mill in with the tired, smoke-tinged labourers who are coming from the platform; those that feel the cold walk with their shoulders hunched up, and those that don’t point out the sky to each other.

Amy peels away right before they enter, but not before sharing a “here we go” and a commiserating grimace with him. 

It’s a shower day for the female Zombies. All through the drift, Kieren felt her annoyance about it prickling right behind their headspace.

If left to their own devices, Zombies have a natural tendency to start smelling like gone-off squid (their breath, in particular, gets bad because of the polyps, or so Kieren’s been told; it’s one of those things you can’t really determine for yourself,) so the foreman and his supervisors periodically move the shifts around so that they can round them all up and force them to scrub down until they reach an acceptable stage of cleanliness. In the early days of the Kaiju War, when nuclear strike was the only way anybody knew how to fight the kaiju, many places along the Pacific Rim set up biohazard shower stations, in case they had refugees come in. It’s these massive, curtained-off shower rooms that they use now. 

It’s not optional.

“May _their_ comfort always trump ours,” Zoe mutters mutinously whenever one of these days come around.

Amy heads off one way, and Kieren goes the other. He doesn’t get very far.

“Kieren!” 

Oh, no. “Hi, Henry.”

Henry Lonsdale lands next to him and then noticeably has to dial back his pace so that he clomps along in stride with Kieren. A helmet covers his short, bristly blonde hair, and he has the fishy mouth of sixteen-year-olds everywhere -- he’s stuck permanently in that metamorphic state. Kieren looks at him tolerantly when he shouts at him, “Where you headed!”

“To church.”

“Oh, that’s cool. Wait, why?”

“I need to talk to Simon.”

“That’s cool! … wait, which one is he?”

“The priest.”

“Oh, right, that’s cool. Ha, wow, I totally forget they have names, is that bad? I just go for the singing. Hey --”

“Henry, if you say ‘that’s cool’ one more time, I will shove you off the rig and let you float on an iceberg for awhile.”

Henry beams, and follows him the rest of the way through the winding corridors, till they round the corner by the on-rig church, not even bothering to shed his uniform or helmet first. There are a fair number of people already in the room when they enter, even though service isn’t due to start for another half-hour. Henry goes in first, picking up a hymnal and calling out in greeting, “Hey, guys, look who I brought!”

“Hey -- !” Kieren starts, protestingly, because Henry’d been following _him,_ but he cuts off in surprise when he finds his arms suddenly full of Brian, who clutches him tightly around the neck. “Oh, okay.”

Pulling back, Brian puts his hands on his shoulders and looks at him. 

Kieren asks, stepping carefully, “Are you okay?”

Brian, of course, just shrugs, a smile pulling at his mouth in one corner like it’s been caught on a hook.

Ian Kugler moves in next, and Kieren’s surprised to get a hug from him, too. Not sure what to do, he slaps at the wings of his shoulders, careful of the kuffiyeh. “Been a while,” Ian says to him, stepping back.

“Yeah,” Kieren agrees, still baffled and edging into pleased. Behind Ian, Henry Lonsdale flips through the pages of a hymnal, checking to make sure he’s got the English version, not the Russian, and further up the aisle, he spots Simon in his clerical collar. The musician at the front of the room is the only woman present, and that’s because she’s a regular inmate and isn’t subject to shower days. “Wasn’t expecting everybody to be so pleased to see me.”

“Of course we are.” 

They all blink.

Brian’s voice is a stodgy thing, sitting squat in his throat like the kind of bullfrog that doesn’t move even under threat of being stepped on, the kind that says, _I’ve been here a hundred million years longer than you and I’m not moving._ Kieren isn’t sure he’s ever heard it; out of the cousins, Zoe’s the one who does most of the talking.

“‘Course we are,” Brian says again, and he tilts his shoulders up, like it should be obvious. “You’re important.”

“I’m,” Kieren says faintly. “Going to go talk to Simon.”

Simon’s Amy-like eyebrows make an impressive leap when he sees it’s him, and he excuses himself from the churchgoer he was talking to, spreading his arms. 

“Welcome back,” he says grandly.

“Don’t,” Kieren tells him. “I can’t take you seriously. I’ve seen you in overalls. It’s in my head. Also, I need to talk to you.”

Bizarrely, Simon looks like he’s contemplating getting offended -- not by the reference to his past, but by the fact Kieren just brushed off his greeting. It clears a moment later, though, before Kieren can start wondering if this day’s going to get any stranger.

“That’s all right,” he replies gamely. “I have something that might interest you.”

On the other side of the rows of fold-out chairs, there’s a door Kieren’s always assumed led to an office of some sort, because it seems like priests would want that kind of thing. He isn’t wrong; it’s a windowless room with vents near the ceiling, and its only occupants are an aluminum desk and a row of filing cabinets, in a way that reminds him of the health clinic in his hometown, and the shabby country doctor who’d given him his vaccinations, seen to his colds, and watched him grow up. The clinic closed at 16.30 every afternoon.

The last time Kieren had seen the man, it was while he was sitting on a desk not unlike this one with lights shining into his eyes. The doctor had, very slowly, realized what he was looking at and recoiled all at once. Sitting at Kieren’s right-hand side, Jem swung her heavy boots and sucked on a lolly she’d nicked from the receptionist and said with all her teeth on display, _If you report him to the PPDC, I’ll stab you through the eye, got it?_

The doctor had swallowed, and written him a prescription for contacts.

(When they came for Kieren, it hadn’t been because of him.)

A thunking noise brings him back to the present: Simon’s removed a box from underneath the desk.

He slides the lid off, and Kieren is immediately diverted, recognizing the symbol emblazoned in gold on top.

“Are those -- ?” he demands.

Simon shows teeth. He removes the tissue paper, and then a set of ceremonial robes unfolds across the desktop.

Kieren steps closer, eager. Buenakai ceremonial robes are only worn when there’s movement in the breach -- so naturally, in the past few years, they’ve all been languishing in boxes like this one, and Buenakai priests wear their everyday attire. They’re a cross between the vestments of a Catholic bishop and something a Buddhist monk might wear.

“Do you have the --“ he starts, but Simon’s already removing the collar and settling it over the rest of the robes. There are seven round, wooden beads on it. “Is this one yours?”

“Yes.”

Kieren nods. The robes are interchangeable, but each priest’s collar is unique to him or her. They’re granted one upon ordination, and one bead is added for every kaiju that emerges from the breach after that point, the size of which corresponds to the kaiju’s Category. With only seven beads, Simon hadn’t been a priest for very long before the double and triple event ended the Kaiju War.

He shifts his attention back to the robes and the silk panel that goes down the back. A long, skinny, and wicked-looking kaiju stands poised like a mantis, ready to strike, with hollow blue pinpricks for eyes. Its whole body is skeletal white, except for the fin protruding from its back, onyx-colored. It’s the fin that’s signature.

“Spinejackal?”

Again, Simon nods, clearly pleased that Kieren knows his gods.

“This is amazing,” Kieren mutters, mostly to himself. “I’ve never seen one in person. Look at this, see, behind the kaiju? Nobody really knew what the throat of the breach looked like -- we had scientific guesses, but that’s all we had until Mori and Beckett went through -- so that’s what this scarring here is supposed to be. The breach. Closed. Like, gates of heaven symbolism and all that.”

He looks up, still pointing, and finds Simon watching _him,_ not his robes -- which is fair, he’s seen them before, but _still._ Is he not even listening?

Self-consciously, Kieren straightens. “And anyway, that’s just. That’s cool.”

“You sound like Henry,” Simon murmurs. 

Kieren makes a face, and together, they fold the robes back into their tissue-lined box. He wonders how Simon got them here. The rest of them had to smuggle in their personal belongings; Kieren’s train map has only survived this long because it’s easy to hide between layers of clothes. Are special dispensations given for religious clergy? Or is Simon just that good at getting people to let him have things?

“Kieren,” he says, when the silence stretches. “You said you had something you needed to talk to me about.”

“Right,” agrees Kieren, remembering. It’d seemed like a good idea at the time, but now he’s distracted. “Right.”

He thinks about changing his mind, and opens his mouth to do exactly that, except then Simon’s expression shifts, and he remembers all at once how, at the top of the wall, Simon’s first instinct had been to haul him out of harm’s way, and they hadn’t even been friends then. Simon became a priest just in time to see his gods driven back and destroyed, and he’s still here. Not a lot of people keep faith after being abandoned.

Unbidden, he remembers another memory he didn’t know he had: of Simon turning his hands over in front of him, his fingers lacing with a nervous fidget, before looking at him -- no, at Amy -- and saying, “My mother. It was my mother. We were hiding her, but that was before we knew about the polyps bursting. She went feral and …” He'd trailed off, then found his voice again. "I'd rather not shoot anyone else, if it's all the same to you. Okay?"

He thinks, again, of Simon’s arms around his chest, hauling him away from Freddie Preston.

“Right,” Kieren says one more time, and then steps away from the desk and starts taking off his shirts.

“Uh,” comes from Simon’s direction.

“Don’t start,” Kieren replies, muffled in the collar of his undershirt -- grey, of course, like everything else. “You inflicted it on me without any warning, either. I’m just returning the favor.”

“I didn’t say I was suffering.”

It doesn’t register until a beat later, and then Kieren’s stomach defies gravity and he freezes. 

He blinks, and blinks again, and they look at each other, embarrassed.

Kieren can see them acknowledge the moment for what it is -- he could dismiss it, and Simon would follow his lead, and they would pretend it had just been a comment and not a pass. Or he could flirt back, and that would be -- that would be terrifying. Or he could stand here and feel mortified and giddy, Simon’s eyes on him turning him hot and cold in turns. Give him enough time, and he could probably blush.

He does nothing, and Simon’s eyes widen fractionally, and then Kieren hangs his shirts over the back of the chair, lets out a breath, and turns around.

The spinal clamp has dug suckers into his skin that stand out like small and nasty bug bites, but that’s it. That’s all the damage that the drive suit has done to him. (So far, at least. They’ve been calibrating the drive suits to the droid, limb-by-limb, but they haven’t put the full brunt of piloting it on them yet.)

Kieren’s wounds are nothing at all like the blackened, charred line that dissects Simon’s back.

“They use proper Relay Gel now,” he says quietly.

For a beat, Simon doesn’t say a word, and then Kieren becomes aware of a sensation up by his shoulder: Simon’s questing fingertips, making sure.

It’s like every slice of air in his body leaves it.

He thinks of the look on Frankie’s face when she watches Henry laugh, that expression that’s almost sick with it, of how Phil’s eyes track Amy and nothing else when she’s in a room. He looks at the vents near the ceiling and feels a lot like he’s on a moving train, unsteady on his feet and wondering, _Has Simon been watching me like that?_

It’s one thing to never be an option, and another thing to be an option without being an option at all, but what do you do when you _are?_

Simon steps back.

“Glad I could be of service,” he says, and it’s not nearly as bitter as Kieren’s expecting. He sounds a little shaky too.

He regains his balance, and pulls his clothes back on. “It was very brave of you,” he tells him, once he’s got his coat on properly. “To warn us. I just wanted you to see that we’re okay.”

Restlessly, Simon takes the fingers that had just been on Kieren’s spine and traces some unidentifiable pattern on the aluminum top of the desk.

“How is Amy?” he asks.

Kieren frowns. It’s been seven days since they formed a neural handshake, and he knows she’s been by. Simon’s a landmark in her drift, visible for miles for all the things he represents to her; safety and belonging. Love. Catfish and labour and religion. She’d come to him with anything. “She’s visited.”

“Yes,” Simon acknowledges. “But when I talk to her, she mostly just talks about you.”

“Oh. Oh, that’s,” Kieren scratches at his ear. “Sorry. That’s.”

A smile pulls at the corner of Simon’s mouth. “It’s okay. I’ve been hearing about you a lot.” To demonstrate, he tilts his head towards the door, and the murmuring congregation beyond it.

“Yeah,” and Kieren’s frown deepens. “That’s weird.”

“It isn’t. Zombies aren’t supposed to be able to be pilots -- we’d proved that before, with me.” But that had been because of the Relay Gel, not because of any inadequacies in Simon as a pilot. Kieren opens his mouth to tell him that, but a look from Simon quells him. It wouldn’t have mattered -- one Zombie’s failing becomes a smear on their entire species. “We certainly aren’t supposed to be able to drift. And here you and Amy are. The first of your kind.”

Kieren shifts, uncomfortable. “We’re not doing it to show people up,” he says.

As soon as the words leave his mouth, he has to admit that maybe it’s not true. It _had_ been extremely satisfying, watching Pieter and his partner fail out of the drift compatibility test and then succeeding where they had not.

“Okay,” he admits. “Not entirely. But we’re _good_ at it. We’re --“

He trails off, and gestures fruitlessly.

The words for it don’t exist. Not in any of the languages Kieren’s picked up. He doesn’t have the words to explain how, in the drift with Amy, none of that _matters._ It’s not a matter of _can_ and _cannot._ It just _is._ He can no more differentiate Amy from himself than he can the color from his eyes.

And Amy’s full of affection the way some people’s hearts pump blood, it’s natural -- 

“-- to her, and I -- she’s the blue in my heart, Simon. That’s what drift compatibility _is._ It’s not who’s strongest or smarter or most special, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve got the blues. It’s who’s willing to let someone else be that -- that -- that --“

He spreads his hands, like somehow that would encompass the _everything_ he’s trying to express.

Simon tilts his head, looking thoughtful. “Have you told her that?”

“I -- no --“ Kieren’s caught off guard. “I -- kind of figured she already --“

Affection crinkles the corners of Simon’s eyes. “You should tell her.”

 

*

 

Amy blinks at him several times in quick succession, like he’d blown dust into her eyes.

Then she reaches out and starts tugging on him in bits and pieces, his earlobes -- he swats at her -- and his cheeks -- he swats at her again, and then gives up -- and his coat, like she’s straightening him out, or like she just needs the excuse to touch him.

She says, with uncharacteristic shyness, “Yeah. You too.”

He smiles, and in return, she shows all her teeth.

“It was worth it,” she decides. “Not dying, I mean. Because I got to meet you. I not-died and then I met you.”

 

*

 

To test the pilots’ connection to the droid, the engineers ran enormous cables from the PONs system through the floor to the droid waiting in the Bay beneath. On the HUD in their helmets, Kieren and Amy could only see the most basic outline of the limb they were moving: in the shared mindspace, knowledge of it was like knowledge of the back of their own heads -- they could feel it because it was a part of them, but they hadn’t yet seen it for themselves.

“We’re basically reinventing the wheel,” Oliver tells them brightly. “There’s no real rush, after all. At least not like there was before, when they were creating the jaegers.”

Amy throws him an annoyed look. It feels pretty urgent to _them,_ now that they’ve gotten involved.

Kieren, however, has gotten good at discreetly treading on her feet before she can put these things into words.

The administrators are concerned about protecting their investment -- “ _shady_ investment!” Amy corrects -- and so it takes nine days from when they first form a neural handshake for them to see their psuedo-jaeger. Properly.

Phil takes them down the lift that opens out into the belly of the Bay.

“We’re below sea level at this point,” he informs them, leading the way, his smart leather shoes making a very different sound on the cement from their boots. “When the Bay doors open, it’ll fill half-way, which will give you enough room to launch -- being that you are, um, well, a submarine vehicle.”

They both nod at him absently.

Suspended from the cables like a marionette, the droid resembles a golem, or a Pokemon: it has a small, fishbowl body and enormous arms that completely dwarf the rest of it, like a marble that somebody had attached a toy’s arms to. Considering the body has to hold the operating systems, the cockpit, and the power cells, it’s not in any way an undersized submersible. There aren’t any legs, but a set of propellers stick out from the back like a ducktail.

Coming closer, they see that the fishbowl look comes from the very thick sheet of glass that coats the front of the body -- underneath, Kieren spots a whole range of sensors and even floodlights, but nothing that looks like a porthole. Whatever they’re expected to see underwater, they’re going to have to see it with the droid’s eyes, not their own.

“Well?” Phil tucks his hands behind his back. “What do you think?”

“It’s smaller than I thought,” Amy says musingly.

Kieren tamps down a smile. He knows what she means -- it’s not jaeger-sized, not even accounting for how they tend to inflate the height and breadth of the jaegers in their imaginations -- but it’s still enormous enough that it seems almost insulting to stand below it and call it “small.”

“The idea _is_ to make it bigger, and soon,” is Phil’s prompt reply. “There are already specs for it. We wanted to see how you’d test inside of it before we did that.”

“You had us test more limbs than just two,” Kieren adds.

Phil smiles. It’s the curling, proud smile of someone eager to show off.

“The arms are adjustable. In theory, we’ve programmed you eight separate types, but in practice, they can form even more in combination. Most deep-sea submersibles are limited because of remote-controlled hands,” he forms his fingers into pincers to demonstrate. “Since you’re connected to the droid neurally, you don’t have the same limitations, so we were capable of enabling it to install and maintain a purification pump at all levels. It’s also partially why we wanted drift compatible pilots --“

Amy and Kieren cut a look at each other. The engineers were forced to admit that they needed drift compatible pilots after they fried Simon Monroe. And possibly other people -- he hasn’t said.

“-- a pilot-to-pilot connection, being, ah, obviously more stable.”

He’s a lot more at ease talking to them alone than he is in front of a group. For the first time, Kieren realizes that Phil is proud of this.

“We’re each in control of our own arm, then?” Amy asks, and Phil nods. Now that they know what to look for, it’s easy to see; each wrist is on a rotator, so that each hand is capable of being changed out even in motion. The arm dangling closest to them currently ends in a clamp. “And it’s functional? No jams?”

“Did you encounter any jams when you were testing connections?” Phil answers without missing a beat.

“No,” says Amy, still looking up. “No, the inmates did a fantastic job on construction.”

Phil’s smile freezes, just a little, and then thaws.

“You’re quite right,” he says. “We’re lucky, too, that the PPDC didn’t notice us appropriating materials meant for the Wall of Life and using them for our own purposes.” He steps back, gesturing towards the lift. “Shall we?”

“Already?” she frowns, looking from the droid to him and back. “But we just met.”

“And soon, you’ll be its pilot,” he points out. “But we have to come in from the top for that. So, back to the ready room. Come on.”

They return to the lift, and as they tug on their earlobes to get their ears to pop on the ascent, he tells them, “It’s a wonder to have gotten this far, I’d say. The technology we need for this project _exists_ \-- humans under duress can accomplish many fantastic things. Many of the sensors placed around the breach, for instance, still function admirably some twenty years on, and the Mark III Restoration Project that Mako Mori established in the early 20’s insured that the three jaegers going down to breach-depth were deep-sea capable, which was no small feat.

However, that was when the PPDC was still writing the Jaeger Programme a blank cheque. More or less,” he says quickly, when Amy automatically opens her mouth to protest: the assault on the breach had only been possible because of Marshall Pentecost’s clever budgeting. “We don’t have that luxury. It’s not really a priority for the PPDC to accommodate us.”

“We know,” says Kieren.

There’s a tech waiting just inside the door to the ready room, holding their helmets in hand.

Behind the observational glass, someone else lifts a hand to catch Phil’s attention, but before he can go, Kieren finds himself saying, “Phil.”

Phil stops and turns, his eyebrows lifted inquisitively.

“You could have moved on at any point. Why are you still on the Aleutian?” Kieren gestures. “This isn’t really … the place for ambitious, aspiring politicians.”

“Oh, no,” says Phil. “I asked for the Aleutian. I like it here.”

“Why?”

He smiles -- a shy, fleeting thing -- and folds his hands behind his back. His eyes trace their armored suits, the helmets in their hands, and move past them, to the PONs set-up and the plates in the floor that will open to the Bay below. “Because I’m ambitious.”

 

*

 

Two techs call up a topographical map of the Bering Sea, which floats above the tabletop in the observation room and simultaneously on Kieren and Amy’s HUD, and they outline the plan:

In the past week, they’ve tested the seawater at several different points between St Lawrence Island and the Russian coast, at several different depths. After collaborating with data pulled from the University of Alaska archives, they isolated results for a chemical that only two people in the room can successfully pronounce, but is colloquially known to the rest of them as “Antigen K.” High Antigen K numbers correlates directly to high Kaiju Blue contamination.

The highest percentage of Antigen K was recorded at the mouth of the Zhemchug Canyon, where the Aleutian Basin plunges into the deep sea. They’ll build the first, central purification station there, because of the canyon’s geographical importance to the subsurface current’s exchange of cold Arctic water to the warmer Pacific seas. All the other pumps will act as auxiliary units to this main one.

Separately, the pieces have already been put together (“whoever our unscrupulous, nameless benefactor is with all this cash, they sure do have a lot of it,” Amy murmurs, and Kieren murmurs back, “do you think it’s Hannibal Chau?” and they both crack up -- Hannibal Chau is a cartoon persona, not a real person -- they’re pretty sure, anyway,) and now it’s up to them to install it.

“How can they expect a few pumps to clean an entire ocean?” Kieren mutters in their bunk that night.

“I suppose,” Amy answers, using one of his shirts to towel her hair dry. “With the same logic that tells us it only took a few kaiju to poison it.”

She tosses the shirt over the radiator in the corner of the room and returns to sit on the edge of his mattress.

“If,” she says. “We can _prove_ that we can clear the Kaiju Blue out of a relatively small area like the Bering Sea, then who’s to say we can’t do it for the Pacific? They’ll have to build other droids.” Her teeth show in the low, luminescent light coming from their eyes. “We might get to teach new pilots, Kieren!”

_We might get to go home,_ he thinks, and his stomach compacts and knots.

The next day, Phil says, “pilots, are you ready?” and Kieren and Amy say, “ready,” with their hearts in their throats.

They’re flung into the blue --

\-- and there’s a hand on their shoulder, a voice saying, “Amy, I want you to meet Delilah, she’s the editor for that fanzine I was telling you about,” and --

\-- Lisa Lancaster is wiping her nose with her sleeve even as Jem’s pushing tissues on her, sitting cross-legged on the bedspread, and they listen from Jem’s doorway as Lisa wobbles, “I’ve already got the dress, I’ve already got the tickets, we were supposed to go to the fete _before_ the dance and then he’s just like, nah, and now --“ and they hear themselves say, “I’ll take you to the dance if he’s such a dick,” and Jem’s whole face brightens, “Yeah, Lisa, we’ll all go, it’ll be brilliant! And how many other tarts are goin’ to bring someone old enough to get them booze?” and they say, “I’m not buying you booze,” and Jem flashes back, “don’t be a blue about it, Kier, my best mate just got _dumped,_ where’s your compassion?” and --

\-- an indeterminate voice, mechanized, saying, _tell me about the numbers, Simon, it’s the numbers I’m interested in,_ and they curl their knuckles away from his door, frowning. Who could he possibly be talking to, and _how?_ \--

\-- and then they are on the other side, and everything is different.

All is dark and they are enormous in the space they occupy. Neither of these things frighten them. Why should it?

“Right hemisphere calibrated,” says the computer, and Amy laughs.

She lifts her arm, flexes it, and on the other side of the PONs, Kieren adjusts to compensate for the change in weight. He’s aware, in a way, that he exists below the waist, but he can’t feel anything. Everything is his chest, his head, his arms.

“Left hemisphere calibrated.”

And Kieren cannot imagine that he was ever made of flesh. Surely he’s always been metal and glass. Surely he’s always been this big.

“Pilots?” says a voice that doesn’t matter. “Ms Dyer? Mr Walker? Do you copy?”

Amy lifts her hand. “That’s not our name!”

There’s a pause.

Then, “Droid, do you copy?”

She laughs. And laughs. And they swing above the ground, making the supports creak, and slow until they stop.

“Aye, aye, captain!” she shouts.

“That’s not -- whatever.”

The lights come on, and Kieren and Amy are both simultaneously in the Bay and above it, and just as soon as they realize this, the magnetic locks disengage and they drop into the cockpit of their droid, cables coiling up and the PONs slotting into place. The hatch seals over their heads, and their boots sucker into the floor for balance.

“I did not expect it to go that smoothly,” Amy says to Kieren.

He admits, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

They hang there, waiting, and the task they’re given for the day is to “take a swim.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s how I wound up in this situation,” says Amy dryly, but they open the doors to the Bay and seawater comes rushing in, and the droid, it turns out, knows what it had been made for. They paddle out past the rig, turn on the jet propellers, and shoot out into the sea.

On the second day, after they’ve proved themselves capable of handling the kiddie pool without breaking themselves or the droid, Phil and the administrators send them out to test a deep dive. The Bering Sea sits largely on a shallow shelf of water that, about a hundred miles from the rig, plunges suddenly into the deep of the Aleutian Basin. The Zhemchug Canyon, where the highest concentration of contamination is, cuts into this plunge. 

They take it in slow increments, cautious of the equipment.

Kieren doesn’t just _see_ the water getting colder and darker as they descend, but he can feel it as well; the metal shell that protects the almost-jaeger’s delicate parts, themselves included, is not unlike Zombie skin in many ways, that awareness of a sensation without feeling any threat from it.

“Careful!” yelps one of the techs over the speakers, after they bang into an overhang and break off a chunk of rock.

Amy snorts disrespectfully. “We have big arms and a tiny head, I don’t know what you’re expecting.”

Taking the situation seriously proves to both be very easy and very difficult.

Easy, because a lot of questionably-obtained money and technology is at stake and having to do repairs would set the whole mission back for weeks, and nobody’s really forgotten what Amy said to Phil at the information meeting last month: _fry a Zombie and you won’t even have to fill out paperwork._

Difficult, because they’re in a jaeger.

Granted, it’s a squat, froggy jaeger that wouldn’t so much be able to _fight_ a kaiju as it would jet its way out of there, but it’s still hard to be afraid of anything when inside of it.

They dive until they reach a plateau, stretching lengthwise along the canyon wall, where a tech tells them to stop. They balance themselves there, which proves difficult because the current’s running through it with noticeable strength, buffeting them sideways.

“Is this where the pump will go?” Kieren asks.

“Yeah,” Phil answers. “How you two doing?”

Kieren looks over at Amy. Amy looks back at him through her helmet. The HUD around her head and arm matches the blue of her eyes, lights playing off her drive-suit.

She grins back at him, and flexes the droid’s arm, striking a pose.

“All right, we get it,” Phil says dryly.

And everything remains fine all through the rest of the dive, following them back to the rig.

However, the moment the neural handshake is broken and they go slamming back into their own heads, something goes wrong.

It’s a peculiarity that starts in Kieren’s elbows and knees and then isn’t in one definable place. His drive-suit is a weight he suddenly wants _off,_ and he frowns and puts a hand to his head. Beside him, Amy makes a noise like a whimper.

His vision swims out of focus.

“ _Amy!”_

“I’m fine!” It comes back in time for him to see her hands land on and shove away the navy-shirted technicians who sprung to her side, like she’d done something that needed catching. “I’m fine. Jesus, Philip, don’t be a worrywart.”

Carefully, they flush the Relay Gel out of her suit and remove the last few clips holding her into her harness, and she steps forward --

Her knee gives out and Nina’s clipboard immediately lands in her armpit so she can have both hands free to catch her, propping her arm up on her shoulder. She holds Amy there as she dry-heaves, and Kieren’s still harnessed in, immobilized, unable to reach her. Someone’s hands lift his face and try to peel up his eyelids, and he bares his teeth.

It’s Oliver who figures it out first.

“They’ve got the bends,” he says with surprise. To a technician standing back, he says, “Livia, how fast did they come up?”

“Ascent should have been normal, Doctor, but nothing about their vitals would have tipped us off if there wasn’t --“

Another tech pipes in, “This could be from yesterday’s swim, too, it can take up to -- I don’t remember -- 48 hours to manifest?”

“Depends on the type, doesn’t it?”

Simultaneous, someone else interjects, “But they didn’t dive deep at all yesterday.”

Everybody sounds so uncertain, and Phil snaps his fingers at them.

“Well, _somebody_ look it up!”

“Decompression sickness,” Nina explains lowly. “In the droid, you’re breathing compressed oxygen out of tanks, and decompression sickness has to do with bubbles of gas in your bodies that form with rapid ascension. It’s not uncommon in deep-sea divers. We didn’t see it often in jaeger pilots, but we didn’t need to -- until the breach, pilots weren’t asked to go to the depths you are.”

Kieren glances at his hands, imagining champagne bubbles fizzling underneath the black nylon and his skin, swelling in his joints or -- worse -- his brain.

“This is really fascinating,” says Oliver with delight, and, annoyed, Kieren slits his eyes at him to see him bending his face too close to Amy’s. “Who knew Zombies could -- ? I would have thought their physiology would --“

“Our brains run on oxygen, too,” she snaps at him, hoarse, and he takes a smart step back. “Just like you, moron.”

_Didn’t I say that once?_ Kieren thinks. Amy had called it naivety then, but just because it was naive didn’t mean it was untrue: the human brain upkeeps the human body the same way a mechanic fine-tunes a car. You need to maintain your vehicle if you want it to transport you anywhere. Brains on the blues are still brains, they’re just driving a different kind of car, one that needs less support. But the brain’s still in control. That’s something humans and Zombies have in common.

Nina disentangles herself gently, and Amy sways but retains her balance.

“The nice thing about DCS,” Nina tells them, coming over to finish unhooking Kieren from his harness. The others are gathered around the tech who was snapped at, frowning at the screen, and Kieren feels that momentary bubble of dismay at watching the people in charge of their wellbeing consulting a wiki. “Is that it’s easily preventable. We’ll pay closer attention to your ascent on your next dive, and if that’s not working, we can treat you beforehand in a hyperbaric chamber.”

“We don’t have one of those,” Phil interjects.

Kieren, Amy, and the scientists look at him.

“… but they shouldn’t be hard to obtain,” he finishes.

Oliver notices Kieren and calls, “You all right, Kaz?”, which makes Kieren prickle all over with irritation. It’s such a familiar response to Oliver that it barely registers.

He answers, “Fine,” because Amy pilots the dominant side, so all problems will manifest with her first.

Just as he thinks this, Amy says, faintly, “Oh.”

Everyone looks at her. She studies the tips of her fingers, and a matching blue-black beads by her nostril and streams over the smear she made, dissecting her face from nose to lip. Childlike, she rubs at it with her knuckles, messing her face further. 

They all look at her, then at each other, and Kieren doesn’t have to see their faces to know that this isn’t a normal presenting symptom of DCS.

There’s a moment where he can see them think, collectively, _We knew it. We always knew Zombies couldn’t do it._

Quickly, Phil produces a handkerchief and high-steps over to her to offer it up, and she looks from it to his face and curls her lip, preparing to drop something sarcastic --

When suddenly, she moves.

Her elbow volleys into Phil’s ribs, almost knocking him on his backside, and nobody has time to do much more than shout before she’s catching Kieren as he collapses.

He regains consciousness in under a minute, to bright lights overhead and Nina’s voice, louder and firmer than he’s ever heard it, “-- don’t you _dare,”_ and Dr Oliver Black’s surprisingly meek response. His eyes tick to Amy’s face, upside-down. Her nosebleed has stopped, the blood darkening and congealing on her upper lip.

He opens his mouth. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

Her expression immediately shifts from concern into indignation. “What’s wrong with _me?_ Excuse me, what’s wrong with _you!_ I was the one bleeding, dumb dumb!”

“And you got dizzy!” Kieren retorts, sitting up so they can glare at each other. “But did you want to give anyone the satisfaction of watching you swoon? No --”

“I didn’t _swoon --“_

“-- you reached into my head and knocked me out instead! That’s really very rude.”

“Oh,” she says. “Sorry.”

He frowns at her and she frowns back, and the next moment, they both burst out laughing.

“This is fascinating,” Oliver says again in the background, sounding really tickled about it. And, because he’s incapable of not being a dick, he adds, “Imagine their faces in Hong Kong when we’re done here and can publish. They’re going to shit their pants.”

“Ugh,” Nina steps away from him.

 

*

 

It’s a matter of trial and error after that, trying to determine which factors are contributing to Kieren and Amy’s state upon surfacing -- are they biological? (They file Amy’s mouth three weeks ahead of schedule and check her medications, just to be sure.) Is it neurological? Is it the strain of the drift? Is it environmental?

They mean well, Kieren supposes, but their execution is ...

Well.

He blinks his eyes open and takes in his surroundings; a metal tube with turn-of-the-century casing and panels, older than Kieren by at least twenty years. Nina’s face is displayed on a screen on one of these panels. All he can see is an unflattering portrait of her chin, but she moves back into better focus when he says, “Why do I get the feeling that didn’t go as planned?”

“It makes no sense!” bursts out of her. She paces out of view and then comes back. Her brown hair’s slung back in a low ponytail, shorter strands escaping over the neckline of her lab coat, and she’s chewed her lips grey.

Inside the hyperbaric chamber, Kieren shifts and says, “Are you not wearing make-up?”

“Not wearing …” she frowns.

He touches his lips, a motion she unconsciously mimics. Her eyes widen.

“Oh,” she says, turning away and fishing through her many pockets. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” he answers quietly, letting his head drop back onto the bench. On the other side of the tube, Amy’s awake, too, although he isn’t sure how much -- he can hear her giggling, seemingly at nothing.

When Nina turns back around, make-up reapplied to a convincingly human degree, he asks, “Doctor, what happened?”

“What do you remember?”

“We were doing a survey in the canyon --“ with all of the deep and the dark, cloudy silt billowing up around them as they squirmed into position on their belly. The floodlights only caught jaggedly on the rocks, making everything seem sharper and more sudden. “And you called us back to base, so we came back. Then I woke up.”

“You were presenting normally until the second we broke the neural handshake,” Nina informs him. “Then you both got … wobbly.”

On the bench across from him, Amy giggles and echoes, “Wobbly,” and giggles again.

“So we put you into decompression.”

“… Right,” says Kieren.

Tinnily, somebody calls Nina’s name and she turns her back to the screen, shouting, “yeah?”

Kieren sits up, half-listening to the one-sided conversation happening outside (“yeah,” “no,” “yeah, I will,” “no, no thank you, I just ate,” which would have to be a lie, and, “oh, shut up, this isn’t the Fifth Element,”) and looking around the inside of the hyperbaric chamber. It’s probably because he’s been spoiled by the HUD, but checking the oxygen levels on a physical dial feels pretty prehistoric.

Still, he figures, their shady benefactor must be invested if they could get them this equipment on such short notice.

“Oh!” Nina turns back around, tapping at the screen like she’s knocking on the door. “You had a visitor, by the way.”

“Did we?” says Kieren, at the same time Amy asks brightly, “Did the visitor feed Oliver to an iceberg?”

“No, unfortunately.”

It's so deadpan that Nina’s already speaking again before it occurs to Kieren to be amused. “But they had to turn him away at the door because labourers aren’t authorized to be in this building. Um. Priest fellow?”

“ _Simon!”_ yells Amy joyfully, and she turns her head so she can inform them both, “I love that man. I’m going to marry him.”

“No, you’re not,” Kieren says.

She considers this, then agrees, “You’re right, I’m not. You’re my partner. We do things together. So _we’ll_ marry him.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Why not?”

He looks over and finds her scowling at him, like she thinks he’s being gross and pessimistic. “It’s illegal.”

The scowl deepens. “ _That,_ ” she says. “Is a very narrow-minded way of --“

“Amy, we’re Zombies.”

“Oh,” she deflates. “Right.”

She transfers her look to Nina.

“Anyway, he’s good people. You should let him in next time.” She flaps a dismissive hand. “He’s not going to sabotage anything or kill anyone in their sleep or blow anything up.”

Kieren squints at the side of her head, because are they talking about the same person? If Simon got behind these doors, he would _absolutely_ take the opportunity to sabotage something. Probably not something critical -- but he would definitely fuck with their coffee-maker or something, just on principle.

“How are we doing, Doctor?” he asks instead.

She makes a fruitless gesture with her hand.

“There is absolutely no reason why you should be getting the bends,” she tells them. “The foreman and them keep on us because they want us to have the answers, but --“ her gestures broaden. “Science doesn’t work like that. The droid’s cockpit is pressurized! That’s a _contained_ environment. You shouldn’t get sick any more than a commercial flyer should get altitude sickness!”

She looks at the screen again, and he thinks she just put together more words in that last bit than she did in the entire first week that they knew her.

“We have no idea what’s going wrong,” she admits, spreading her hands.

“What about the droid?” Amy asks. She’s sitting up now, her blue eyes luminescent in the enclosed space.

“What …” Nina blinks. “About it?”

“What do you do to minimize its symptoms?”

She doesn’t _sound_ wobbly -- in fact, she shows every sign of being completely lucid, except for what’s coming out of her mouth. Her gaze is level as she tracks from Kieren’s face to the screen and back again, waiting for an answer.

“I --“ Nina stutters. “I don’t understand? Its symptoms of … DCS? But DCS occurs when bubbles of inert gases form in the bloodstream and cause damage --“

“-- to various organs and such, yes, we know,” Amy finishes, like, _and your point is?_

“So droids can’t get DCS.” Nina makes a face, like that’s not a sentence she ever thought she’d have to express. “Droids … can’t get sick, at all.”

“It’s connected to us,” Amy points out. “It’s a physical extension of us, innit? So our brains go into the drift, and the droid is aware that there are complications with the human body. It doesn’t matter that it’s a _droid._ If it _thinks_ it should get the bends, then wouldn’t it pass that on to us?”

“Droids don’t have brains,” Nina says blankly.

Kieren and Amy look at her.

“Or …” Her eyes start to widen. “Or they do? In the mindspace you make for them. So your symptoms _are_ neurological.”

“And then grossly actual,” Amy touches her nostril, like she’s feeling the phantom path of a nosebleed.

Kieren never gets those -- as far as the K-scientists can guess, they have more to do with the mental strain of piloting a droid at deep-sea levels than anything else, thus making it harder to control. As the dominant pilot, Amy experiences the worst symptoms.

And then, as they’re bobbing along the surface just outside the rig, whitecaps bursting into foam on the droid’s hull and the sky a lumpy, slate-grey expanse above their heads, Amy turns a corner in the drift and slams right into a RABIT.

“What --“ she starts, and the memory engulfs her as fast as a wave.

Kieren pulls her back out before she can destabilize the pilot-to-pilot connection, but the droid rocks in the water as Amy’s arm pinwheels for balance. Her alarm shrieks clearly across to him like a flash of sudden light, and the droid’s hydraulics lock up in response.

She turns, the HUD floating around her head flicking towards him. She yells, “Why didn’t you tell anyone you were hallucinating!”

“Because I didn’t know they were hallucinations until just now!” he yells back.

Kieren never gets the nosebleeds, but he does get memories he can’t possibly have:

He remembers the ghostly-white, skeletal spectre of Spinejackal emerging from the grey, its eyes slitted, eerily blue -- Kieren had been nine years old when Striker Eureka laid Spinejackal to rest in the Melbourne fog, and much more concerned with the fact his sister kept stealing his favorite blanket because she had this idea that if she kept their store-bought eggs warm, then they’d hatch. He’d been nowhere near Melbourne, and neither had Amy, and yet the memory is clear.

He remembers Gary Kendal knocking back a pint, a Colt on the counter in front of him -- could never happen, there’s strict laws on guns in the UK, and Kieren’s pretty sure nobody but Bill Macy even owns one. Gary meets his eyes and bares his teeth, and Kieren turns away, feeling hunted.

And he and Amy have never actually smashed a man’s head open before, right?

It doesn’t matter, because he remembers it in vivid detail.

They’re like Amy’s memories -- objectively, he knows they cannot be something _he_ lived, and yet, here they are, like some sick, darkly twisted alteration of their shared experiences.

He’s in the showers, and he remembers watching Delilah hang herbs in the pantry, tying twine around stems of lavender, rosemary, and mallow, and in the next instant, he remembers his sister’s best mate, Lisa Lancaster, and she’s standing in front of the cave where Kieren caught the blues, blood dripping from the crown of her head to her chin, and Kieren -- as helpless as a shepherd after the last of his lost sheep -- trails downhill to her.

Brain matter is gelatinous, he knows, and it’ll get caught between your teeth and --

He shakes his head and sticks it under the spray, ignoring the way his abdomen contracts in an effort to retch, and fortunately, nobody around him is paying attention: nearby, they’ve started jeering at Henry Lonsdale for … exactly what men jeer at other men in the showers for.

“I’m _sixteen!”_ Henry objects, his voice a miserable, embarrassed moan. “What do you expect!”

It’s a shower day for the male Zombies. It doesn’t matter that they all have a habit of showering on their own, they need to be _made_ to do it, too. Kieren tips his head up, letting the water run over his open eyes. Behind him, supervisors squelch wetly up and down the main aisle between the shower heads, which is the only place the spray doesn’t reach. The rolling curtains only afford privacy insomuch as no one can see them from the corridor outside.

Rationing had been at its strictest at the end of the Kaiju War, immediately after the breach was sealed, as all those displaced people started migrating home, but in the years since then things have slowly eased, and the soap the supervisors allot them is the real stuff: the whole basement smells like industrial-grade disinfectant, and also a little bit like French lavender, like the kind Delilah dried in the pantry to cover the smell of cut onions and the occasional rankness from the loo. Kieren doesn’t mind that part.

“You know what’s interesting?” Simon muses from the shower head to his right. He scrubs at the back of his head, dark hair parting, his fingers stopping just before it reaches the place where his spine splits.

Kieren tries not to look at him.

(Kieren was at Norfolk, and nobody needs to ask about Norfolk -- the nakedness isn’t the problem. He’s never felt more like the property of the PPDC than he does when they’re all herded together and soaped down like cattle because the people in charge don’t like the stink, so this is one of the few arenas in which Kieren is not self-conscious. 

No, he doesn’t want to look at Simon because Amy’s right: his hair, when it isn’t slicked back off his forehead into its usual style, is somehow _more_ terrible. He stops looking like a salesman and starts looking like somebody you’d want to hide your children or your valuables from.)

“What’s interesting?” he asks, since Simon seems to be waiting for a response.

“Henry doesn’t take every opportunity to point out you’re from the north anymore.”

Kieren pauses, the bar of soap poised over his nails. (He’s almost, _almost_ got all the phantom bits of brain matter out.) “Yes,” he says slowly. “That’s absolutely the most interesting thing in my life right now.”

_Spare me,_ says the look Simon tilts in his direction.

“I mean,” he says. “He calls you ‘neighborhood’, and you call him the same, even though I’m certain neither of you have set foot in each other’s counties.”

“God, no.” 

If Freddie Preston was what Kieren’s little sister would call a “typical English boy”, then Henry Lonsdale is what she would call a “southern tart.” They just plain grow them funny down there.

The taste in his mouth is almost gone, so he ducks his head and spits soapy water, scratching at the corners of his mouth; he still feels the blood there.

“But that happened during the war, don’t you think?” Simon muses. “Neighborhoods shrunk? Or is it that the idea of them got bigger? It’s what happens when people’s focus turns outwards towards the enemy coming from the breach, instead of making an enemy out of the person across the fence.”

“True,” Kieren acknowledges. 

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Amy grew up in a village forty minutes away (“Lancashire, ride or die!”), and Henry’s a southern tart, and Min Seong’s from Leeds, and Simon’s lived in Belfast and Miami and Singapore, and only crossed the sea to England once for a football match his tenth year, but Kieren’s as possessive of them as if they’d all shared hopscotch squares on Lark Lane as kids.

It’s what happens when aliens emerge from the breach and forces everybody into an “us vs. them” mentality.

The timer on the showers start flashing the thirty-second warning, and the supervisors shout in earnest over the shower room chatter. Kieren thinks, wryly, that he and Simon removing their shirts for each other had been a lot more intimate than whatever this is.

Still, something like vertigo happens to his insides when the shower head quits and he turns to find Simon watching.

“Well?” he folds his arms. Around him, the others are shouting, jostling each other for position to grab the first towel. “How about it? I hear you’re the expert -- do we no longer smell like day-old fish market?”

Obligingly, Simon leans in close -- close enough that Kieren’s gut does something unpleasant and squishy, like he really is made of fish guts.

“Hm,” he says thoughtfully. “Halibut.”

Kieren scoffs, and queues up for a towel.

 

*

 

His birthday and Amy’s are less than a week apart: he’s been twenty-one for four days and she’s one day away from being twenty-three when they officially activate the purification pump at the mouth of the Zhemchug canyon.

The sound it makes coming on is what Goliath must have sounded like: a deep, rocky rumbling like something heavy being dragged across the ocean floor. The water amplifies it -- Kieren imagines he can almost feel the vibrations on his skin, and he shivers inside the plating of his drive-suit. Lights flicker to life all along the site, and Kieren and Amy spring out of the way just as water starts vacuuming towards the front section.

Once they reach a safe distance, they stop and drift in place, and watch the pump slowly come to life.

Kieren glances up through the HUD, and lifts a hand to the Talk button. “How’s it looking over there?”

“Give it a moment,” Phil’s terse voice replies, and Kieren exchanges a look with Amy. “We’re waiting for the readings to transmit.”

Somewhere in the dark, some Kaiju Blue-resistant fish streaks by, skirting the edge of the droid’s proximity alarm.

They get their answer even before Phil says it: the cheering that bursts out of the ready room makes the speakers crackle, and the beginning of Phil’s statement is drowned out, blurred into a single, deafening noise.

“-- preliminary -- of Antigen K is at 0%. If there are any trace amounts remaining, they’re infinitesimal to the point of negligible. We did it.”

The smile comes through clear in his voice.

Across from him, Amy’s teeth flash, a gleaming white smile.

“Well. You did it,” Phil corrects himself.

“You helped,” Amy allows, magnanimously, and when she laughs, he laughs back at her. In the drift, her joy bubbles into Kieren’s, where it simmers together, a warmth that he can feel straight down to his toes.

Phil tells them, “Come on home,” and they kick up out of the silt.

Previously, when they’ve docked the droid and came out of the drift, there’d been any number of people there: Phil and his diagnostic team, the techs (who were all engineers in their own right), and Oliver and Nina and the skeptical scientists (“Does that make them S-scientists?” Amy wonders. “Skeptical scientists? Or Z-scientists? Or would they still be K-scientists, since technically Zombies wouldn’t exist without the kaiju?” “Amy.” “Right. Sorry.”)

Today, all those people become a din -- they all want to clap Kieren and Amy on the back, to share this victory and see it shared back -- and for once, Oliver’s general repellant personality becomes an advantage, as he clears space for Kieren and Amy to disengage and ride out the bends that follow.

The room’s near-empty when they come out of it, so there’s scarcely anyone around to see Amy wipe the black from her nose and then step down into Phil’s space. He clears his throat, tugs on the inch of cuff showing from underneath his labourer-grey suit, and crosses his arms behind his back. 

He seems very interested in the grating under their feet. His ears are bright red.

“Oh, no,” mutters Kieren.

Amy reaches out and socks Phil’s shoulder. “Good job,” she tells him, stepping back, and it turns out that Phil’s got the kind of smile that shifts his ears up his skull when it gets really big. She waves her hands at him, saying, “Well, go on, then. You’ve got all sorts of announcements to make -- the world’s one step closer to detoxification, innit?”

“I -- yeah,” Phil agrees, and finally shifts his eyes away from her to take Kieren in, too. “Congratulations, you guys.”

He leaves, and they stay behind until Nina gives them a clean bill of health. Shyly, she keeps dodging their eyes, like she’s afraid to meet them, but she can’t keep the smile off her face.

“Nina …” Amy starts, but she shakes her head quickly, silencing her: there’s still a few technicians nearby.

“Just,” she says. “Just. Thanks, okay?”

“Yeah,” Kieren and Amy say together. They don’t need to be told what this moment means to Nina -- specifically.

She lifts her head, shifting her clipboard so that it’s tucked against her chest. “Do you know what they’re saying? They’re saying extra food rations. _And,”_ she adds, when Amy just lifts her eyebrows, like, _whatever._ “Extra heat lamps for the Zombies. For what you did today.”

“No problem,” Kieren says dryly.

“Anytime,” Amy chimes in.

“We’re here if you need us, promise.”

“Cross our hearts and hope to blue.”

Kieren elbows Amy. She elbows back.

Nina heaves a patient sigh, and shoves them both towards the door. “Go on,” she says. “Today, I think, belongs to you.”

It had snowed while they were at sea; the rig is cloaked in it, the buildings quilted together in purplish-white drifts. The moonlight off the snow makes the whole place seem much brighter than it really is.

But that’s not the most surprising thing:

The road between the garrison and the platform is packed. It seems like every labourer not actively out on the Wall is here, crowded into this narrow space, the healthy bundled up and mostly obscured, the Zombies with their blue eyes showing.

Amy stops dead in her tracks, and Kieren almost runs directly into her back, but doesn’t, of course -- his body knows where hers is in space better than it does its own.

Nina had tried to warn them, in her own way: an announcement must have been made to the labourers, too. 

It takes the others a moment to realize they’ve arrived; after all, the droid is enormous, and it’s so easy to forget that the people who pilot it are actually very small. Kieren remembers the first time he saw a live interview on the news with the pilots of Tacit Ronin -- they were the same size as their interviewer. They should have been jaeger-sized, he figured, at least. 

There’s a stir, and everybody draws up together. The whisper sounds like snow falling.

Amy’s hand slips into Kieren’s, squeezing.

And the crowd erupts into applause.

The noise of it is like a thunderclap, and it leaves Kieren blinking, overwhelmed by the faces turning towards them.

Faces, he realizes, that he all knows, by sight if not by name. He’s worked with them on shift, both on and off the Wall. He’s queued with them for anti-kaiju meds, out-climbed them in the not-a-Kwoon. He’s listened to them talk about the cure, talk about the rest of their prison sentence, but most importantly -- he’s heard them all talk about their homes, in one form or another.

Congratulations from them means so much more than it had from Phil and Phil’s team.

Mara bursts out of the crowd, tackling Amy with a squeal.

“You did it!” she cries, and spins Amy around until the both of them are laughing and shouting and bouncing on the balls of their feet. “You did it, you did it!” 

She transfers that embrace to a startled Kieren, shouting in his ear, “You both are so amazing, I’m so glad to know you!”

“Thanks, Mara!” he shouts back.

They’re passed down through the crowd like that, accepting a lot of back-slaps and fistbumps but, mostly, a lot of hope: _you’ve got a bunch of little pumps left to go, yes?_ and _imagine what’s gonna flourish once there ain’t an’more Kaiju Blue in the sea!_ and _first step, curing the sea! Next step, us!_

It’s Amy who spots Simon first.

She breaks away from Clementine Watson, and her joy ricochets off of her into Kieren through the leftover connection from the drift.

Then she’s off, pelting through the crowd. It parts for her without fuss. 

She flings herself into Simon’s arms, nearly pitching them both over backwards. He recovers his balance first, and engulfs her in a bear-hug, swallowing her up against all of his labourer greys. The warmth on his face is open, unreserved, and when Kieren approaches with not nearly as much breakneck speed, he transfers that look to him; teeth on display, eyes crinkled at the corners.

And Kieren --

Kieren doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow.

He feels everything at once, it seems like. There’s the blinding feeling he’s getting from Amy, a flash-bang of affection and euphoria that obliterates him, bares all of his insecurities in stark light and makes them look so small. It’s all of her love for Simon made his. He cannot untangle it, her feelings from his own.

Simon Monroe, who’d come straight to the administration building, a place he would never be allowed to enter, all because they’d been hurt and they were _his._

Amy steps back automatically, wide-eyed.

She knows what he’s going to do even though he doesn’t, not until the second he’s doing it:

He steps into the half-open circle of Simon’s arms, tilts his head, and moves in.

Simon shifts his weight onto his heels, startled, and his mouth under Kieren’s is a shocking sensation. Kieren chases the movement of his head, mouthing briefly at his upper lip, and there’s a moment in which he thinks, _well, this is going to be humiliating. How did I read this wrong?_

And then Simon lids his eyes, grabs Kieren by the face, and kisses back.

He rocks his weight back into him, holding Kieren still with both hands under his jaw, and Kieren is at once completely groundless, weightless, floating somewhere at jaeger-height.

The crowd around them _roars._

“Holy _shit!”_ shouts Frankie’s voice from somewhere, and, much closer, Amy’s laughter is the only thing he cares to hear; astonished and big as cathedrals, her hands still caught in their coats.

Then Simon kisses him again, with feeling, and Kieren loses track of everything for a little bit.

“Hey!” someone bellows from somewhere very far off. And, “ _Hey,_ Rangers!”

Amy turns, and after a beat, so does Kieren -- although it takes more effort to disengage him from Simon, it seems like, than it had to disengage him from the PONs.

It’s Mahmoud shouting at them. He’s backlit by the large overhead monitor on the tram platform, the one that usually shows zone breakdowns for each shift and weather reports. But now it’s playing footage from underwater, the moment when the pump activated, all its lights coming on group-by-group, and the droid’s froggy shape leaping back.

Mahmoud waves at them, then cups his hands around his mouth and hollers, “Your jaeger! What’s its name?”

Kieren looks at Amy and Amy looks at Kieren.

She doesn’t hesitate.

“Blue!” she calls back, and the crowd roars at her in answer. It’s strongest from the Zombies, but loud, too, from the people who know them. Amy flahses Kieren a brilliant smile, and Simon’s got an arm around both of them, and joy fractures through her voice like it’s more powerful than a fist:

“The name is Blue!”

 

*

 

“-- and we’ve got you scheduled in the droid for every day except Tuesday next week -- you’ll just be in the ready room for that day -- and on the 15th,” he flips through his notes. “Yeah, on the 15th, you’ll take Redeemer Blue back to the canyon for follow-up maintenance if there --“

“Sorry, what?” Amy frowns.

“-- needs be any. There haven’t been any problems yet, but it’ll be nice to have some eyes on it, too. What?” Phil frowns back at them.

“ _What_ did you just call us? Our droid, I mean?”

“Oh,” he says, glancing between them. “That’s what everyone’s calling it, I -- isn’t that the name you picked?”

Amy and Kieren glance at each other. “We just called it Blue. I don’t know where the rest of it came from.”

“Er, the labourers, I think. Perhaps there was an informal vote?”

Another look passes between them, dryer this time. They know exactly who would want a moniker like “Redeemer Blue” to catch on.

It makes sense, really. Jaegers always have two names, and to call their droid Redeemer Blue would call back to Romeo Blue, the first jaeger to ever successfully go up against and defeat a kaiju, because like Romeo Blue, Redeemer Blue is the first of its kind.

 

*

 

For days afterwards, the mood on the rig is more infectious than a sneeze.

As if it senses this, the weather outside gives them the very best of April, the sunlight pale but bright and the clouds forming wispy drifts against a surprisingly blue sky. They’d forgotten it could even be that color. The wind, for once, is only a salty sea breeze and not knives of cold stuck beneath their collars.

It puts Kieren in mind of how they’d been as children, knowing a school day was about to be cut short because of parish meetings or the fetes or rain days -- everybody moving about with energy, smiling at each other without having to ask why.

It makes for a fantastic few days that Kieren floats through.

The change happens slowly. One week becomes two, and the warmth of the energy around the rig starts to turn dry and brittle, like grass that’s ready to be set alight. Everybody feels like kindling, sick of waiting to burn.

After all, Redeemer Blue was supposed to change things, wasn’t it?

The labourers are going about their daily routines convinced that soon, they won’t have to do it anymore. Why would you go out and build a Wall against a threat that doesn’t exist, when you’ve got something more productive happening in the ocean underneath you? Why announce that you’ve done something nobody else in the world has done before, and then send everybody back to their rations and their bunks and the Wall?

They’re practically a Shatterdome now! Right? They’ve got their own Rangers -- they’ve got Zombies, even! Zombies can do more than work themselves to death or go feral, who knew? But they’ve got proof of it!

Surely that counts for something.

Surely that’s going to attract _some_ kind of attention, and once they’ve got some kind of attention, things _have_ to change! The conditions here can’t continue: the penal sentences, the misappropriation of labour, the _pointlessness_ of the Wall of Life operation. The Aleutian rig doesn’t need to be building a Wall, they need to be building more pumps, more droids. _Anything._

But each day follows the next exactly as it had before.

There’s no change in shifts, no contact from the outside world. 

Amy and Kieren find Oliver in the staff break room, breaking open a vaccuum-sealed pack of ration biscuits with an expression of deep dissatisfaction. 

He removes the coffee pot from the burner, turns around, spots them in the doorway, and startles. Coffee slops everywhere.

“ _Holy_ Hundun,” he gets out, glancing down at the stains on his slacks and shaking coffee droplets off his hand before sucking at the places where the liquid had hit hottest. “You got me. That was very creepy, well done.”

“So what’s up with our benefactor, then?” Kieren asks.

“Does he like what we’ve done with the place?” Amy adds.

“I --“ Oliver blinks. “I, what?”

“Our benefactor,” Amy echoes. “Moneybags. The person --“

“-- or organization --“

“-- that’s funding all of this.”

“We haven’t gotten any feedback, and --“

“-- we’re concerned about our occupational performance.” Amy adopts a beatific smile.

Oliver squints at them, like he knows that somehow they’re taking the piss but isn’t certain enough to call them on it.

“The PPDC must really detest them,” Kieren muses. “If they have to go to such lengths to conceal their -- and obviously, your -- involvement.”

“Okay, first of all,” Oliver cuts in, and Kieren and Amy exchange an amused look. That hadn’t taken long at all. “We _are_ part of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps. My boss had a vision regarding the Kaiju Blue that the rest of the board members elected to ignore, so he and his partner took matters into their own hands. The plan was never to _conceal_ what we’re doing here. We’ll just be a step ahead of the rest of them when they come around, and they can thank us then.”

Amy considers him thoughtfully. “Pretty sure that’s mutiny.”

“Treason,” Kieren corrects her. “Mutiny is for the high seas.”

“Where do you think we are, dumb dumb?”

“Who are they?” Kieren fires at Oliver. “Your boss and his partner?”

He sniffs, ignoring them in favor of rolling up his cuff so that his wet sleeve isn’t flopping around his wrist, and after a beat, admits honestly, “I don’t know. He uses a voice distorter when we make our reports. He’s no jar-head, I know that -- he keeps up with our reports even when they’re at their most technical.”

“A K-scientist, then?”

Oliver nods. “I should think so. Or an engineer. The partner isn’t in the picture anymore -- a lot of us died, you know,” he adds belligerently. “As a direct result of doing what we do. I’m happy to work for him. This is important, what we’re doing here. It’s important to my boss to carry on his partner’s legacy, and important to the _world._ And you should be glad, too. Without us, you’d still be at the top of the Wall.”

But Kieren and Amy are just two people. The rest of their friends _are_ still at the top of the Wall, and as they days go by it becomes more and more obvious that the Aleutian isn’t going to make that triumphant announcement to the PPDC. They’re going to keep on using Redeemer Blue behind the scenes.

“Why would they give that up?” Nina says quietly. She holds her wrist still so that Amy can knot a strip of nylon around it. Small, budding flowers cover the whole length. “They’ve got a monopoly; the world’s only jaeger, and a wealth of unpaid, uncomplaining labour. Why would they tell the PPDC about that, and have them come in and take it?”

Amy finishes the knot, and Nina gives her wrist a shake so that the flower bracelet falls into place.

“Thanks,” she says, smiling shyly.

“You deserve it,” Amy says. “For putting up with that lot.”

In the second week, small incidents start occurring. Someone throws oatmeal at a supervisor in the inmates’ cafeteria, and everybody pretends they saw nothing. On Thursday, outdated equipment in zone three breaks down and Ian Kugler has to staple together a deep slice in Frankie’s forehead. She immediately wraps her headband around it, but with permission, Henry pulls it up to take a peek, and says, grey around the mouth, “That’s way too close to your brain.”

The day after that, one of Mahmoud and Zoe’s routine discussions on the tram ride back to the rig gets abruptly very lively when Mahmoud surges to his feet and shouts, “You need to _stop_ calling us that!”

Zoe blinks, caught off-guard, and then her expression goes sharp enough to cut.

“Oh, _no,”_ she says. She has platinum blonde hair and platinum blonde skin and she looks poisonous, a diamond-backed snake, distaste coiled tight in her expression. “ _Please._ What have I called you that is in _any_ way harmful?”

Mahmoud puts his hand on his bench back, leaning into her space. “I don’t know if you even know you’re doin’ it,” he tells her, with a sudden lack of volume in his voice that’s even more dangerous than the shouting had been. “But you keep callin’ us the _healthy_ labourers.”

He holds up a hand to forestall her angry response.

“I get it, I do. To you, that’s probably the most important thing about us -- that we don’t got the blues. You probably don’t see nothing else. But I’m telling ya, tea-time, not all of us are healthy. You can’t live in the middle of goddamn nowhere with no sunlight and nothin’ green to look at and still be _healthy._ Some of us got blues that got nothing to do with Kaiju Blue.”

“It’s not --“ Zoe starts.

“I _know,”_ says Mahmoud, with an earnest sympathy that stops Zoe short. “Trust me, I know. But you can’t get _nowhere_ if you don’t stop talkin’ over the problems of the people you’re fighting _with!”_

The end spikes back into a shout, and Zoe’s mouth twists, and she slams her hand down on the bench back, next to his.

“You’re right!” she yells into his face. “Sorry!”

“It’s fine!” he yells back.

He sits down, and they glare in opposite directions for the rest of the ride back.

The mood on the Aleutian is shifting like a tide receding backwards. It leaves detritus in its wake. Labourers draw together in groups, and the supervisors cross between them, their shoulders knotted, aware of all the eyes that follow them. It’s making them jumpy.

“Good,” says Zoe with satisfaction.

“ _Not_ good,” Kieren mutters to himself nervously.

He’s crossing the rig at the same time the B shifters are getting ready to head out to the Wall. The tram sits with its doors open, waiting for the last of its passengers, and when Kieren goes by, he spots a familiar profile on the stairs, pulling his coat on over the rest of his labourer greys, and gets an idea.

“Simon!” he calls.

The figure by the tram turns, his eyes scanning the grey cement, the squat grey buildings, the red transmitting tower before it lands on Kieren. Even from a distance, Kieren can see his smile.

He jogs the rest of the way up the steps onto the platform, and Simon meets him by the old, weathered sign that outlines the purpose of the Wall of Life project. Most of the text has peeled off, and the proud emblem of the PPDC been graffitied over. Kieren glances up at the blobs of spray paint, wondering if they’re supposed to be a kaiju. 

He’s in the middle of saying, “Hey, glad I caught you, I need to talk to you --” when Simon turns him and backs him up against it.

The expression on his face is focused, and for a moment, Kieren assumes Simon’s moving him to make room for the rest of the foot traffic, but there isn’t much. Kieren quirks his mouth, puzzled, and then dismisses it.

“Can’t you do something about your followers?” he asks.

Simon pauses, his eyes flicking back and forth over Kieren’s facial features. It’s taking a valiant effort for him to focus. 

Earth to Simon. Did he just wake up?

He shifts his weight backward -- and Kieren hadn’t realized just how close he’d been standing until he’s no longer there -- and asks, “My ... who. What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Kieren says. “You, can’t you talk to Zoe and Brian and them, tell them to cool it? I tried, but -- they like me well enough, but they believe I’m wrong about this and it makes them,” he waves a hand around. “Pigheaded, I guess. They’ll listen to _you,_ though.”

Simon doesn’t even need to ask what he’s talking about.

“I,” he says, still seemingly wrong-footed about something. “I, yeah, I’ll try.”

That’s all, and Kieren starts to frown, uncertain. Simon is rarely at a loss for words.

A beat later, though, he finally seems to catch up, because he resettles his shoulders, blinks a few times, and meets Kieren’s eyes. His hands, which had been on Kieren’s shoulders, fall away. “You do understand where we’re all coming from, though, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. But they’re going to start thinking they need to do something _brave_ and it’s just going to wind up with somebody -- I don’t want anyone to get _hurt.”_

“And you think the supervisors will hurt us?” Simon’s tone is mild.

_No,_ Kieren thinks, because he assumes that everyone possesses the same basic level of decency; even people whose names he fundamentally does not want to know. But, “Yes.”

Simon starts to say something else, and around them the few last-minute B-shifters are still making their way for the open tram doors.

And just like that, belated understanding hits Kieren all at once.

“Oh my god,” he blurts out. “You were trying to kiss me!”

The preoccupied expression on Simon’s face immediately clears, and a wryness takes its place. Deliberately, he looks at their feet and then at the sign, which is still flat against Kieren’s back, and says, “Yes, I was.”

“Oh, well, then,” and that’s the only warning Kieren gives before he grabs Simon by the front of the coat and lifts himself up. He catches him just as he opens his mouth to speak, so as far as kisses go, this one’s mostly teeth and breath, and to make matters worse, two women with the blues round the bottom of the staircase at that exact moment and spot them.

For an awful beat, everybody just looks at everybody else, embarrassed, and Kieren thinks they might get away with it, but then the women burst into laughter and run up the rest of the stairs in a hurry.

“In my defense,” Simon says, low and amused and up against Kieren’s cheek. “I was _prepared_ earlier.”

“Sorry,” says Kieren, miserably. “I wasn’t. It’s not something I usually have to watch out for.”

“Hey,” and Simon’s hands are on his face, tilting it up. “It’s all right.”

Kieren looks up at him, and Simon shifts one more time, squaring his shoulders like he’s preparing them for whatever weight Kieren can think to put on them. His eyes are close, and earnest, and they watch him back, blue all the way through.

And Kieren needs, _needs_ to kiss him, so suddenly it lances clean through him, slicing away everything else. 

His vision haloes.

It’s the only sensible course of action. He looks at Simon and understands for the first time how, all those eons ago, the first ancestor of man with no idea that his bones would someday be branded with a genus and a species and a strange Latin name, took the most valuable tools he had at his disposal -- his lips, which had evolved to be sensitive enough to determine the smallest variations in the texture and temperature of his food -- and put them to another person’s for the first time, and found it rather joyful.

His hands are under Simon’s coat now, at his waist, fisting in the cabled fabric of his jumper and pulling him in. Their hips bump, and Simon’s eyes lid, and Kieren shifts his head up, and it’s as if he can _feel_ the buzz of anticipation in his lips, and --

The tram doors start to beep their ten-second warning.

“Hold that thought,” murmurs Simon.

He tears away and sprints across the platform.

With his hands still outstretched in the shape of him, Kieren lets his head falls back against the sign, and he says, “ _ugh,”_ feelingly. Above him, the blobby graffiti that strikes out the official PPDC albatross watches him unsympathetically.

“Shut up,” he tells it.

He pushes himself off, his insides squirming in a way that’s both unpleasant and very much not.

_So you’re going to keep kissing the kaiju priest,_ he tells himself, heading down the stairs. _The kaiju priest that you kissed in front of_ literally _everybody you know. That’s fine. Somewhere, your sister is rolling her eyes and she doesn’t even know why._

 

*

 

The next day, Clementine Watson goes feral and falls off the Wall.

 

*

 

It’s not that she and Kieren had been friendly, really, any more than people whose names appear next to each other in the alphabet are: her “here”s followed his during roll call for months, and the last time he’d gotten his mouth filed down was the same time she did, and they both grimaced at each other until their mouths stopped looking like a wreck.

But on the day that Freddie Preston went feral, she’d put herself between Kieren and the supervisor before Kieren could act on the violence that lit him up, and you don’t forget that, not really.

And it’s not about how her death makes _him_ feel -- it’s that she had to die at all.

Ngozi, who’d tried to stop it, walks around all that day with her arm twisted close to her body and an expression on her face like she was still there, staring out over the icebergs with no company except the wind, until Min Seong pins her down and staples together the gouges dug out of her skin.

“I tried to pull her back,” Ngozi explains. “She was too close to the edge, but she --“

The marks torn into her arm are mouth-shaped.

“It’s funny, innit,” says Min Seong quietly. She’s from Leeds, and her greatest fear is that one day she’ll open her mouth and it’ll be as blue as Otachi’s in Hong Kong, and all her four children will ever get is a statement in the mail. 

“Funny,” she says again. “How they can put droids in the deep, deep ocean, but they can’t come up with a solution to a feral Zombie that isn’t ‘kill it’.”

“Here,” says Kieren, passing her a carton he brought from the administrator’s building. “More staples.”

They start appearing in the things he draws when he isn’t paying attention. Amy will nudge him, murmuring, “Kieren …” and he’ll look and find Freddie Preston looking back at him, fingers frozen in the act of turning his wedding ring, or Clementine’s thin face, where phosphorescent growths form a ridge above her eyes and coat her throat bumpily.

“Oh,” he says. “I’ve been hallucinating them, haven’t I?”

Amy hesitates. But your drift partner is the only person who knows your mind better than you know it yourself, and she nods.

A horrible thought occurs to him.

“I didn’t make them up, did I?”

“No!” she says quickly. “No, but they never … looked like that. They weren’t that kaiju, I mean.”

It goes with them into the drift, a cold draft at their backs that turns the blue around them to ice. It cracks underfoot, no matter how carefully they tread. It’s impossible not to feed each other in the drift; Amy’s frustration sends spiderweb fractures running through their heads, and so her frustration becomes his, too.

The only thing the foreman and his administrators do to officially acknowledge Clementine Watson’s fall is to bump up everybody’s mandatory filing; Kieren is now due to have the polyps in his mouth filed in three weeks, instead of right before the rotation change.

“Does it hurt?”

He looks up. Mara’s in the chair across from him, letting Amy rearrange the ice pack on her shoulder. When her hand clamps down, Mara’s mouth twists, and then evens out. She’s got a book spine severed across her knee, the library binding crinkling as she moves to cross her leg in the other direction. She’s only got the book checked out for another week, and reading to them aloud is proving to be quicker than waiting for them to finish smuggling it back and forth between their bunks.

(Henry Lonsdale’s currently on shift, or otherwise this meeting would be a _lot_ louder.)

He doesn’t answer immediately, and her eyes flick quickly to the others. “Is that a rude thing to ask?” she wants to know, a little nervously. “I haven’t talked to Zombies much, is that not etiquette --“

“It does,” Kieren says. “It hurts. It’s one of the things we actually _really_ feel.”

“And they don’t believe us when we try to tell them that,” Min Seong adds, propping her chin up on her hand. On her other side, Brian’s tearing something battered and grey into rags; somebody’s uniform, most likely. Recycling on the rig is a matter of survival. “They think we’re just saying it to avoid getting our polyps taken care of. Like we _want_ to go feral.”

Mara blanches, and everybody skates uncomfortably over the silence that follows, not wanting to say anything.

And then, because Mara’s like Amy -- full of affection that bubbles and fizzes, affection that buoys, and Kieren didn’t ask for Amy’s friendship and he didn’t ask for Mara’s, but Kieren Walker hasn’t made a habit of asking for what he needs -- she starts to show teeth. “So if y’ve got sensation in your mouths, does that mean when you kiss it’s …”

She trails off, and lifts her eyebrows at him in a very deliberate way.

Kieren groans and covers his face.

The table laughs, and Frankie cups her hands around her mouth, cat-calling him good-naturedly, which makes him try to sink even further into his chair. He’s going to be _infamous_ for that, isn’t he?

And it’s into this noise that Amy says, “I don’t want you to do it.”

Bit-by-bit, the laughter peters off, and Kieren blinks at her.

“What?”

“I don’t want you to do it,” she says again. Her voice is only large enough to make the climb across the table and no further. Her head’s down, hair obscuring her face, and she’s working on wrapping green tape around wire; it’ll be another flower for her headband when it’s done.

“Don’t … go in to have my mouth filed?” Her hair shivers with her nod. “Amy, I have to.”

“Yeah, but … what if you didn’t?”

He frowns. “Amy, I _have_ to.”

She sticks her thumbnail under the edge of the roll of tape, worrying at it. 

“It doesn’t feel right,” comes out of her all in a rush. “Your head, I mean. I mean you in your head, it doesn’t feel right. It does something to you --“ her eyes dart up, seeking theirs out for confirmation. Min Seong’s already nodding, and Brian shrugs at her in a way that clearly means _yeah, I know._ Getting your mouth filed makes your head fuzzy. “I don’t want them messing with your body, Kieren.”

“Amy …”

“No, listen, there’s got to be a way we can do it ourselves. Amongst ourselves. Zombies figuring out a way to help Zombies, right?” More nodding, and she warms up to it. “There’s got to be a humane way to make sure we don’t go feral that doesn’t involve getting mutilated.”

Kieren scowls. “Amy, don’t be stupid.”

“Ohhh _hhh,”_ and he hears the exact moment she loses control. Her voice climbs. “And it would help me out if you weren’t so _spineless_ all the time!”

It’s a barb, and it’s meant to go deep, and it does. 

Kieren snaps back, “You know, your forehead is really unfortunate,” which doesn’t have anything to do with anything but is as insulting as he knows how to be, and everybody at the table knows it.

Amy's eyes go hard, sharp, and next to her, Mara says “oh, dear,” very quietly and frowns down at her book. 

Frankie leans in to Min Seong’s space to ask in a low and worried voice, “Can jaeger pilots even _get_ divorced?”

“I don’t think they’re like that,” is the murmured reply. “I think.”

And just like that, the stinging in Kieren’s gut fades. Amy must see it on his face, because her hackles go down, and there’s already a conciliatory smile on her face when she turns her head, rearranges the ice pack, and says, “Mara, my gosh, we keep interrupting you. Did you want to keep reading?”

 

*

 

There’s so much K-science doesn’t know about Zombies. 

How did they survive exposure to the Kaiju Blue? What was it about their biochemistry that let them live where another died? 

What’s the exact survival rate? How many people die per one person who survives?

Can it be predetermined? Will there, at some point in the future, be a test that people can take at their neighborhood clinic that will tell them if they’ll turn Zombie if they get contaminated?

What about people like Amy? Can the blues truly defeat a terminal illness? Or does it just delay it?

Is there a cure? A permanent one?

And what’s the role of the kaiju in all this? 

Officially. 

Everybody’s got their theories, of course, but it’s another thing to have it confirmed by science. Every part of the kaiju was engineered to be a weapon, blood included, so it stands to reason that if the initial kaiju invasion couldn’t kill the human race, there’d be a back-up plan.

If you can’t kill humans with monsters, then make monsters out of humans.

“I don’t understand,” Kieren says, smiling politely at a labourer he doesn’t know as he squeezes himself in with four other people on the edge of the man’s mattress. “How does Simon get this information? I mean, how does he communicate with the outside world?”

“Carrier pigeon,” the labourer responds dryly.

“Message in a bottle,” adds Arabella, scratching thoughtfully under her beard.

“Burning bush,” offers somebody from the bunk above.

“Shush,” Amy tells them. “He knows a K-scientist with the PPDC who feeds him their discoveries before they do up the official statement. I heard them talking once at the camp on Gorgona.”

“K-scientist?” Kieren echoes, at the same time the bunkmate says, “How?”

“I don’t know,” Amy answers him, leaning into Kieren’s side as Henry Lonsdale shoves his bum into a nonexistent space at the end of the mattress, forcing the rest of them to budge up. “I was eavesdropping through a closed door. And the voice was distorted anyway, I wouldn’t be able to identify it if I heard it again.”

“Distorted.” 

Kieren’s still just repeating words, but he sees the expression on Amy’s face change, the memory shifting around inside her head and fitting with a click. She looks at him, her eyes widening until the whites where the kaiju color hasn’t reached are showing.

She says, “oh my _god,”_ with sudden understanding, and that’s as far as she gets before Simon hauls himself up to stand on the radiator and bangs on the nearest bunk to get their attention.

Even accounting for the fact that some of his bunkmates would still be on shift, Simon’s room is full to the gills; many of his usual churchgoers are here, plus extra. When Amy had said, “come on, we’re going over to Simon’s,” Kieren had followed, and a small part of him had hoped it might end in a kiss for him. Looking around, he admits that’s probably not going to happen.

“All right, if we’re settled,” Simon says to the bodies sitting half on bunks and half on each other. “I thought I’d get the most important thing out of the way first: Morocco won the World Cup --“

“ _YEAH!”_ somebody shouts, so enthusiastically that everybody starts laughing.

“-- and Seeo’s quite excited about that, apparently,” Simon finishes dryly, with a nod in the enthusiast’s direction.

From the bunk above Kieren’s head, Zoe’s voice asks, “Who even was playing?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Simon replies. “But by all accounts it was a great game.”

There’s a supervisor who comes to church now, sitting in the back and politely refusing a hymnal. Supervisors aren’t welcome, not for this part of it -- the church, Kieren realizes, isn’t the room with the kaiju frozen in their stained glass, it’s this: them and their questions, and Simon who would probably fall off that radiator if they weren’t all labourers and used to balancing precariously.

It’s easy to tell which bunk is his: it’s the one with the kaiju graffitied on the wall. At least, Kieren thinks it’s supposed to be a kaiju.

In point of fact, it looks more like the same cluster of blobs that had been spray-painted on the Wall of Life sign than it does any kaiju he knows.

“Secondly,” Simon’s saying, and there’s an ironic lilt to his voice. “After four years and numerous studies, our beloved Pan-Pacific Defense Corps has come to the tentative conclusion that scientifically, there is no harm in a Zombie when it’s in its non-feral state.”

More laughter, and Simon grins back at them, tilting his head in acknowledgement.

It’s ironic, of course, just how little K-science knows about Zombies, considering what went down in places like Norfolk and the rehabilitation centre in Singapore.

The irony is two-fold. Zombies, when captured, get parceled out to whoever petitions for them: these are mostly labour camps wanting cheaper prisoners, but privately-owned clean-up sectors along the Pacific Rim have a sizable number of them working for them, too. These are all isolated places. The only contact the labourers get with the outside world is when rotations change every six months.

So even if there _were_ breakthrough scientific discoveries being made more regularly than this, the Zombies themselves are the last to hear about it.

If the idea is that Zombies are unfit for life with regular people, then it’s self-fulfilling. Nobody can function in society after that much isolation, and if there’s one thing they’ve learned from the regular prison inmates, it’s that people who can’t function get fed right back into the system.

“Took them long enough, then, do you think? Most of us could have told you that, but if you needed the scientific backing, there you go. Exposure to the blood or other discharges --“

“That means _sex!”_ interjects Henry Lonsdale in a gleeful stage whisper.

“-- of a -- yes, thank you, Henry -- of a non-feral Zombie will not result in contamination. The only way a Zombie can kill with the Kaiju Blue is when they’ve gone feral. Which,” he adopts a too-casual tone that sounds disturbingly like Oliver. “If they’re taking their medication regularly, shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“What do normal people care about that!” somebody shouts. “They hardly ever see us anymore because we’re all here!”

“What about the cure!” somebody else wants to know. “How come they ain’t found that yet?”

“I would think there are colonies of Zombies that haven’t been caught yet,” Frankie murmurs, looking up at them from the floor. She isn’t wearing her headband, and the gash in her forehead bares its stapled teeth at them. “Aren’t there?”

“That’s what everyone’s afraid of,” Kieren answers her, and she leans against his legs. “Unregistered Zombies aren’t getting medicated and could turn feral as soon as the polyps in their mouth go fresh.” _That’s why they set up the reward system._ Of all people, he doesn’t have to tell Frankie that. “So maybe it’s more relevant than we think.”

On the bunk above, Zoe makes an audible comment of, “Shame that there’s no way we’re dangerous before we go feral. I sure did enjoy snapping my teeth at the tourists.”

After her employers turned her out for surviving exposure when the rest of her crew had died, Zoe lived in a city-cemetery in the South Pacific, where she scavenged with other Zombies until the PPDC cracked down and all the graveyards were shaken up, their pockets turned out by head hunters. The first conversation Kieren ever had with her was about missing artwork in coastal museums; she’d been angry about that, too, all that art drowned or stolen.

_I’m not going to stop being angry, Walker,_ she’d said, when he’d made a comment. _Zombies are infatiguable, so I might as well put it to good use._

“Be real, Zoe,” someone else says. “You’re just mad that you can’t black widow your way through the world’s population of living men.”

There’s laughter, and Zoe allows, “Well, that’s true.”

On the other side of the bunk, the obvious must have just occurred to Henry Lonsdale, because he sits bolt upright with a gasp.

It makes the mattress jolt, startling the too many people sitting there. They look at him.

He looks back, and says, “I _can_ get Mara Anwonsewu to date me!”

“Henry,” says Kieren, as Frankie goes stiff against his knees.

Henry’s mouth is a round, startled shape, and he looks at them with rapture in his eyes.

“I can get Mara Anwonsewu to date me,” he repeats in a breathless whisper. “And sex with me wouldn’t even kill her!”

He pauses, and then his expression turns sly.

“ _Well,”_ he adds, dragging it out. “Not unless I was just _that --“_

Kieren, Amy, and Frankie, in unison: “Henry, _no!”_

“You’re sixteen, mate,” adds the labourer whose mattress they’ve appropriated for this meeting, incredulous.

Henry opens his mouth, indignant, but it’s Frankie who whirls on him.

“That’s got nothing to do with it!” she says hotly. “If the PPDC thinks we’re adult enough to come here and work ourselves to death as labourers, then we’re old enough to make up our minds about that!”

She whips her head back around and says to Henry, “And _you -- !_ You shouldn’t date Mara because she _doesn’t want you to.”_

“… Right, okay,” says Henry meekly.

Kieren glances sidelong at Amy and finds her eyes wide, her mouth twitching.

Later, on their way back across the rig to the administrator’s building (Kieren hadn’t gotten a kiss, although Simon had spotted him in between everybody else and noticeably, visibly brightened, momentarily displaying all his teeth in delight, and there’s a tiny spot inside Kieren’s chest that’s still a little warm from that,) the wind cuts at them from around the corner and Amy draws her coat tightly around her, mostly out of habit.

She shoves her hands into her pockets and cranes her neck back.

“Look at the stars, Kieren,” she tells him.

He does. There isn’t a single cloud in the sky. The rig is the only lighted thing for miles; its starkly-lit platform, floodlights pointed at the single broad avenue between the buildings, and the red winking light on the radio tower. Kieren supposes they could see more stars if they were out to sea, but it’s nice enough here. 

(He wonders, too, if he sees less stars now than he did before his eyes started to glow of their own accord.)

“Yeah,” he says. And then, “Did you ever wonder if Phil wanted to have sex with our kind because he thought it might kill him?”

“No,” she says shortly. “Do you know what I miss? Cats. I haven’t petted a cat in _so_ long.”

“Amy.”

She tosses him a look over her shoulder. “What? I never had unprotected sex with Phil Wilson, handsome, get that look off your face. Besides, it turns out it’s all perfectly safe, so!” She shrugs. “It’s worth the time it takes, really. I mean, for us -- you know.”

“I know,” says Kieren.

She comes back to him, removing a hand from her pocket to sock his shoulder. “And anyway,” she says with confidence. “You love me. Remember, you still loved me even when you thought I was a murderer.”

“I worried that you were an _extremist,_ there’s a difference.”

A grin spreads across her face, lighting it up.

Before he can stop her, she darts in and squeezes his cheeks. 

“ _Amy!”_ he protests, and she laughs.

“Oh, it’s so _nice,”_ she says, stepping away from him and spinning in place, grey coat falling open. Her boots make wet tracks on the places where the tarmac’s dried. “To have answers, however small they are!”

She stops, and lets him catch up to her.

“Remember when you and I started getting these fancy accessories,” she gestures to her eyes, then his and back again. “There was no explanation. None. Zombies didn’t exist yet. As far as everyone was concerned, Kaiju Blue killed and that was that.”

“The first place anybody turned was England,” Kieren reminds her. “We were probably one of the early ones.”

_It’s our punishment, innit, that it was our country that got the rotters first,_ Bill Macy’s voice echoes in his head.

“Right. The people turning Zombie now, they’ve got all of us,” she spreads her arms. “Okay, sure, they’ve got the PPDC, too, and they might want to prepare for some sort of lynching or social ostracism, but they weren’t like us. They weren’t completely in the dark.” Her hands go back in her pockets. “And that’s nice.”

“Yeah,” Kieren agrees.

She smiles musingly. “Do you ever wonder who the first idiot was who went to a doctor and was like, ‘lookie here! I’m becoming a kaiju!’”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” he says, wry.

“Me neither,” she says. “I was on my own for a long, _long_ time. Made it all the way to Singapore before I got captured. Dropping off the radar is really easy when you don’t have to worry about going hungry. And the medicine’s easy enough to make.”

“That was after Dr Geiszler’s assassination.”

“Yes,” and she gives his arm a squeeze. “I’m sorry about that. About leaving you. I didn’t want to do a runner, but --“

“No, I wanted you to. I didn’t want you to get caught -- I mean, you weren’t dressed like a labourer, so I figured no one had turned you in yet and I didn’t -- it’s fine,” he finishes lamely.

She swipes her wrist to key them into the administrator’s building.

Even though there aren’t any supervisors immediately visible, she drops her voice anyway, and asks, “How did you make it so long without getting turned in?”

He shoots her a look.

“Yes, I _know,”_ she says quickly. “It’s just, time and memories is -- you know how it works.”

“My family hid me,” he says. “When my eyes got too blue to hide with contacts, they kept me indoors and told everyone I’d gone off to uni and was much, much too busy to bother with the likes of my daft old mum and dad.”

Amy watches him, her smile simultaneously warm and sad.

“Fam,” she murmurs appreciatively. His love, his gratitude -- all of it he made hers in the drift, but now she’s got the reason for it.

Then, “Head hunters?” comes out, like she’s just now sliding the memory into the timeline.

“Yeah,” he says. 

“Right. _Oh!”_ She jolts. “That reminds me,” and she pops up onto her tiptoes, kissing him flat on the mouth.

“ _Amy,”_ he says with amusement.

“What?” She holds open the door to their room for him, her eyes wide and innocent. “I could feel you _pining_ for one and I’m not even connected to you at the brain like I usually am.”

 

*

 

The next morning, in the ready room, Amy loops her arm through his, half-pushing herself up, half-pulling him down so that she can whisper in his ear, “They’re scared of us, aren’t they?”

He looks at her, and she gestures with a jerk of her chin to encompass the people bustling all around them.

Without meaning to, he thinks of that time on the Wall when she looked dead at him and said, _You still think like you’re one of them, don’t you?_ and it had tripped him as surely as if she’d flipped him over the scaffolding. He glances around -- the blacklisted K-scientists, unranked technicians standing at attention behind the observation glass, and nobody’s looking back -- and thinks that he probably already knew that. He’s probably known that since his first day at Norfolk, when they took his clothes to make a point.

It sits in his head like a rock, and slowly, steadily, he pries it up to take a look at what’s underneath.

“They don’t care about understanding _how_ our condition works,” he says, slowly, and Amy’s hand tightens on his arm. “They’re only studying us because they need …”

He frowns, not liking it.

“They need a better way of controlling us.”

“Can’t do it through food,” Amy agrees. “Can’t make us do what they want by offering us rations or threatening to take them away -- we don’t eat. Can’t frighten us with pain -- that won’t work -- so they’ve got to find some other way to keep us subjugated. Quiet.”

Kieren’s mouth moves without his permission.

“Dr Geiszler’s murder at the hands of Zombie extremists won’t hold traction forever. They’ll keep us imprisoned and they’ll restrict our movements until they find something _biological_ that justifies how much they want to hate us.”

With repetition, the pronoun feels more and more comfortable, and more remote from anybody that Kieren knows; his parents, his sister, Mahmoud and Rick and Phil Wilson. They. They, they, they. 

Not us. 

Them.

Amy slides neatly into the next leap of logic. “The Pan-Pacific Alliance only holds together so long as there’s something to be allied against.”

“And there aren’t any more kaiju, so it’s got to be us, because we wouldn’t exist if the kaiju hadn’t made us sick.” It hits him, then, like a fist in his teeth, and he works his throat, trying to swallow it down. “They’re never going to cure us.”

 

*

 

“God, I hate the nosebleeds. The nosebleeds are the worst part, do you have a -- thank you. I mean, okay, so every part that’s actively happening to me is the worst part, but these are really the worst part.”

With bits of tissue now shoved up each nostril, his voice comes out plugged-up, and he seems to be inspecting the front of his shirt.

“That’s never going to come out.”

It’s not clear exactly what he’s referring to. There’s not enough lighting and the video quality’s only 360p, so if there’s blood on his button-up shirt, it’s impossible to see. 

The damp trail of spilled beer, however, drips straight down to his stomach. _That’s_ probably not going to come out.

“Where was I? Oh, right,” says Dr Newt Geiszler, without waiting for a response. He jerks his head up from the contemplation of his shirt. His eyes are runny and he hasn’t shaved. With the exception of a few grainy seconds caught on a video-phone in the K-shelter with Otachi in Hong Kong, this will be the most-watched video of his life. Neither portray him flatteringly.

He lifts a hand and spreads out his fingers. “Zombies. Zombies, right? Like, feel free to agree with me here at any point, but why are we calling them Zombies if we’re not even going to treat them like zombies? I’m telling you, humans are genetically preprogrammed to do three things: feed, fuck, and shoot the everloving _shit_ out of the risen undead. Thank you --“

He accepts another tissue, rips the raggedy bloodstained ones out of his nose, and works on tearing up and shoving more pieces up there.

“Like,” comes out of him, blubbery and nasal. “I was prepared for the zombie apocalypse when I was fourteen, all right. That was well before I even had my second PhD, so you know I took that shit seriously. I mean, if we have incontrovertible _proof_ that Zombies exist and that their numbers are rising, then why aren’t we shooting them already? Did we all forget the legacy that raised us?”

He cuts off, cough-laughing drunkenly.

Someone off-camera (not the person who’s obviously filming from behind their drink) says with audible dryness, “Spoken like the red-blooded American glory hound you are, Newton.”

“I’m _not_ a glory hound,” Dr Geiszler says primly, with the offended air of the very drunk. “I am _cautious,_ Hermann, please use that big brain of yours and discern the difference. Where was the first Zombie case reported? England? Isn’t that where they built that quote-unquote treatment facility to determine if the Kaiju Blue could be used as a biological weapon? So why aren’t we addressing this problem, is what I’m …”

There’s a moment of not-quiet where, in the background, glasses clatter and people converse in an oblivious way, and Dr. Geiszler taps, taps, taps his fingers on the bar in front of him. 

He doesn’t finish his sentence, and he doesn’t seem to notice that he hasn’t.

“I’m sick of seeing kaiju everywhere,” he says, apropos of nothing. “And you have to understand that that’s weird, for me. But either we get rid of them or we don’t, there isn’t a -- there shouldn’t be an in between. It shouldn’t be ‘oh well _some_ kaiju scion is okay. We’ll tolerate that. There’s no way _that_ will end badly.’ It should --”

His head lifts, and he looks directly into the camera.

Immediately, he frowns. “Dude, are you taking a picture of me? That’s gross.” And then the wheels turn in his head, clicking into place, and he sits up. The video tilts away from him, but not before, “Are you _filming_ me --“

It cuts.

He never apologizes. That’s not Dr Geiszler’s style. He does go through several legal channels to get the video removed, which of course ensures that everybody sees it. By the end of the week, a white-walled facility in Norfolk that calls itself the Pentecost Memorial Treatment & Rehabilitation Centre is completely empty, its hallways smelling like sawdust and floor wax. Kieren Walker is given grey clothes and sent to a labour camp in the Philippines. 

Almost overnight, the reluctance to appear anti-Zombie disappears. Dr Geiszler is, after all, an authority in K-science, and if he says it -- drunk or not -- then it has some credit, right? It’s not _prejudice,_ it’s _science._

There are some people, of course, who think that the assassination in the City of Flowers wasn’t organized by Zombies at all.

That they were framed because it was easy. Because it lent an excuse. Because if Zombies murdered their rock star scientist, then it justified everything they were going to do to them.

Scapegoated.

But nobody wants to listen to that. It’s not as interesting.

 

*

 

“J’ya ever have those toys as a kid, the ones where, like, the arms and legs were detachable and you could switch them out for those big-ass guns and stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s basically what they’re doing for you, brah.”

“Right,” Kieren agrees. This makes perfect sense to him -- after all, he’d been an infant in arms on K-Day, and spent his childhood running around the woods in a foam drive suit, pretending his sister was his co-pilot and rabbits were kaiju, coming home and asking what news was there on the jaegers. Detachable arms and legs and bigger guns were newsworthy. He’d be more concerned if they _weren’t_ taking apart Redeemer Blue to see how they could reassemble it more efficiently. “Are you working in the Bay, then?”

Mahmoud shakes his head. “Are you guys still not allowed to volunteer?”

“No,” says Kieren. “It’s only an option for the healthy labourers. Zombies go out on the Wall.”

“Hmm. There ain’t any increased rations or nothin’ for it. Literally the only reason why you’d give up a shift on the Wall for one welding shit in the Bay is because it’s warmer. Everybody does, though. It’s a powerful incentive.”

“So why aren’t you?” he asks.

A Brian-like shrug shifts the weight of Mahmoud’s shoulders. It’s the kind of shrug that communicates a dozen things at once.

“Tryin’ a keep my head down, tea-time. I got one more rotation and then I’m going _home._ Ain’t gonna risk that.”

A pause, and then he skews his mouth. “Sorry,” he adds, like he thinks maybe Kieren might find that offensive.

Kieren just gestures at him, like, _what._ He’s the one who repeatedly turns down invitations for a game of football because he didn’t want to risk _liking_ people. Liking people meant you were more likely to do something dumb, and dumb things mean they’ll never let you see your parents and your sister again. He hardly has room to talk about Mahmoud not wanting to volunteer to work on Redeemer Blue.

“What are they doing?”

Mahmoud shows teeth. “They’s gonna give you legs.”

Kieren sees it coming, and lifts a hand to forestall it, already saying, “no --“ but it’s too late. Mahmoud throws his head back and belts out, “ _Legs!_ And she _knows how to use them -- !“_

“Oh, god,” Kieren detours down the next available hallway, and Mahmoud’s cackling follows him.

On the next mission, they send Redeemer Blue out to the shelf by Unalaska, where they anchor down and activate an auxiliary pump.

Big black fish idly circle around them as they work, and the current keeps buffeting them and pushing them inland, so with Mahmoud’s forewarning, it doesn’t come as a surprise when they next report to the ready room and Oliver greets them with his mouth full and says, “Morning, folks! We’ve got some new body parts we want you to test. Doughnut?”

They fix him with a look.

“Oh,” he remembers. “Right. Sorry. Nina?”

“No, thank you,” says Nina politely. She approaches them with their helmets, the Relay Gel a murky, honey-colored coating on their insides. “I’m not a breakfast person.”

Oliver shrugs. “Your loss,” and he dunks the doughnut into his styrafoam cup of coffee and somehow manages to get the whole thing into his mouth in one go. Nina, Amy, and Kieren all exchange matching looks of disgust.

With cooperation, the mechanics of it come together: Kieren and Amy test their connections to the new limbs and provide feedback, the engineers discuss, Phil Wilson organizes the labour to make the necessary adjustments happen, and by the end of the week, Redeemer Blue has functioning legs, positioned squatly under its body and easily dwarfed by its top-heavy arms. They’re there mostly to act as bracing struts, an anchor for balance.

And with legs, Blue suddenly looks a lot more like a jaeger.

Albeit a small, dumpy one. The jaeger version of a fairy godmother.

“With --“ Kieren says. “Arms like the Hulk?”

“Yes,” says Amy stoutly.

A few minutes later, she leans over.

“What is _that?”_

Kieren grins and tilts the clipboard towards her. On the back of somebody’s report, he’s doodled Blue up in the corner -- Blue in a tutu and wings, one humungous arm lifted so that its wand can trail sparkles behind it.

“No,” she reaches over and lifts his hand from where he’d unsuccessfully tried to hide the other sketches on the page. “That.”

“Designs,” Kieren says evasively. “Jaeger designs.” She peers at him, eyebrows lifted, until he adds, “I was thinking of what Blue might look like if it’d been designed at the height of the jaeger era. See?” He turns the page. “Mark III. And that’s the Mark IV version -- they needed different advantages in order to compensate for the variations between Category III and Category IV kaiju and --”

“They look like gladiators.” Amy’s taken the clipboard from him, studying the doodles in detail.

“I was thinking a knight.” 

He contemplates telling her that he came out of the drift with these designs in his head, like Blue had left them for him, but that’s probably ridiculous. There’s got to be some K-science name for when a pilot thinks their jaeger is daydreaming about Coyote Tango and Romeo Blue.

“Have you ever seen a knight, handsome?”

“Hey! You lived in London, didn’t you ever visit and see the suits of armor they have in the Tower of London?”

“I remember Henry VIII’s had a nut sack the size of --“

“ _Amy.”_

She smirks, and lapses into silence, lifting the report and finding an identical one underneath it. Embarrassed, somehow, to see her watching his work like she recognizes it, like she expects it to walk off, Kieren swallows and looks around, tuning into the noise around them for the first time in a while.

The common room is at its busiest, with those who just finished the C shift starting to trickle in in their dress-down greys, scrubbing at the oil and grease underneath their nails, and before the B shifters start drifting off to bed. The cousins are still at the foosball table, Brian focused and Zoe uncharacteristically quiet, and the crowd of spectators around them has grown. Foosball is the compromise reached between American football and literally everybody else’s idea of football. A supervisor sits by the door, occasionally stopping and searching people coming in or out -- compared to almost every labour camp they’ve come from, the free reign they have on their off-hours is luxurious, but the presence of a supervisor in their common room has gone from sporadic to nearly every-day, ever since the oatmeal incident.

He glances back at Amy. “What do you think?”

“Utter rubbish,” Amy pronounces immediately, and offense sears Kieren down to the bone.

“ _Excuse_ you.”

She grins. Tossing her braid over the other shoulder, she leans in again and steals his pencil. She flips through the reports until she finds a half-page sketch of Redeemer Blue as a Mark III.

She tells him, “We can’t have a jaeger if it doesn’t represent the motherland, Kieren Walker.”

“Amy, we’re not giving it a nut sack -- jaegers don’t _need_ \--“

Laughing, she scratches at the paper and then turns it towards him: she’s added a lightning-bolt shaped scar to Blue’s visor plate.

“Oh my god,” Kieren starts, but a slamming and sudden explosion of noise from the foosball table interrupts him.

Zoe throws her arms up in victory, coming around the table to accept congratulatory back-slapping from her team. Brian frowns at the table, like he isn’t entirely sure what just happened, but when his cousin comes at him, he smiles and shrugs at her, and she grins with all her teeth. 

“Incoming,” Amy murmurs, and they draw their chairs up together as the whole group descends on their table.

“ _Kieren!”_

“Oh no.”

Henry Lonsdale’s body weight slams into the chair on Kieren’s right, skidding it into him.

“Mate!” he hollers, with a volume that’s like a flash-bang. Kieren’s heard Henry in church, though -- that loudness that he can’t control becomes something else entirely when he’s singing. “I haven’t seen you in _forever,_ they moved me to A shift, see, it’s _terrible,_ I never get the chance to hang out with you guys anymore.”

Kieren frowns. “Then shouldn’t you be in bed, Henry? You have to be up by the time the next shift ends.”

“Yeah,” Henry agrees. And, “Hey, do you really think Mara Anwonsewu has zero interest in dating me?”

“Less than zero,” Kieren says dryly.

“Honestly?”

“ _Honestly._ I think she likes beards. And black belts.”

“I can grow a beard,” says Henry promptly, and then he frowns and rubs at his hairless, teenage chin. He corrects himself, “I can draw a beard on. It isn’t hard. Arabella does it with make-up and hairspray every day, doesn’t she.”

“Arabella.” 

“Yeah,” says Henry, and starts dotting his cheeks with his fingertips. “I watched her once. She takes make-up -- like, the prison-made kind, obviously -- and she’s doing this,” he keeps tapping at his cheeks, demonstrating. “And she blends a few layers of it and then she puts hairspray on it so it doesn’t come off easy. It’s so cool, she comes out looking like she can fight a bear. But mostly, it makes people leave her alone.”

“She’s a Zombie?”

“Yeah. She’s Frankie’s bunkmate.”

“Ah.”

A beat. Henry transfers his drumming to Kieren’s arm rest, fingers tap-tap-tapping. 

He persists, “Sooooo …”

“Henry, she doesn’t _want_ to date you. And she’s older than I am. _Trust_ her.”

“I like older women!”

Zoe enters the conversation at the wrong time. They look at her and she looks at them, and Kieren opens his mouth to head off whatever comment she’s going to make, but she surprises them both by laying a hand on the back of Henry’s chair and saying kindly, “And older women like you, Henry.”

They blink at her.

And she finishes, “The same way we like chinchillas and small animals that are likely to take a shite on our hands.”

Henry turns to Kieren with a look on his face, like, _I don’t know what I was expecting._

Smirking, Zoe turns back to the table, and it takes Kieren a moment to realize what the others are doing.

“-- where did you get these?” Amy’s asking, stretched up off the edge of her seat to see across the whole table -- at least three large topographical maps of the Bering Sea have taken over its surface. Kieren recognizes the dark blue landscape, dotted with surgical lines that mark depth changes. It’s been written on, detailed down to each and every pump they’ve installed so far with Blue. He tilts his head, and it occurs to him that the other markers must be potential places a pump will go once Blue’s finished being upgraded. 

Everybody’s talking loudly over everybody else. Kieren steals a quick look towards the door, but the supervisor there isn’t paying them any attention. 

Why would he? They’re just foosball players, rowdy about a good game.

“We got them off one of the engineers,” Zoe tells Amy, and behind her, Ngozi takes a marker from Ian Kugler, saying, _No, not there, the Wall fucks with the current, remember? There’d be no point._

Amy frowns. “How?”

“Brian traded in sexual favors.”

They all pause and look at Brian, who shrugs noncommittally.

“Why do you need it?”

Zoe sits on the edge of the table, propping her foot up on Kieren’s chair. “When education is refused to you, it’s up to you to educate yourself. And to give that education to other people,” she gestures behind her, where Ngozi picks up where she left off, talking fast, gesturing animatedly. Ian nods in tandem to her words, frowning down at the map. “We get so little that we’ve got to pass it on when we do.”

At Kieren’s right, Henry suddenly says, “oops,” and vacates the chair. 

Kieren glances over, sees Simon saying, “-- no, Henry, it’s fine, you were here first --“ and Henry waving his hands quickly, “no, no, go ahead!” and his stomach promptly swoops like he’s at the top of the Wall, leaning out over nothing.

Simon tries to insist, but Henry’s already hopped up onto the table next to Zoe, so he goes ahead and takes the seat at Kieren’s right.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Kieren replies. “How’s your mouth?”

Simon grimaces. His lips are tinged the same blue of his eyes and his collar, and it makes them look as if the human color had been painted onto them, only to start wearing off. Kieren doesn’t need to see them to know the filed-down polyps inside his mouth will be gruesome.

“Does it look that bad?” he asks.

“No,” says Kieren quickly. “I mean, you look better. I mean, not that you --“

He gestures, and when Simon’s eyebrows tilt towards his hairline, he gives up and drags a hand over his face in embarrassment. When he next brings himself to look, Simon’s moved closer, his hand lifted and his fingers half-curled as if he was -- what, going to touch Kieren’s cheek? But he drops it without contact.

Kieren swallows. Looks away from Simon’s mouth.

“You look fine,” he manages, and it’s not a lie.

Well. The hair’s still a tragedy, but their lives are about compromise, right?

“Zombies,” Zoe’s saying to Amy. “Have to help Zombies, because nobody’s going to do it for us. That’s what a kaiju-fearing world does -- it forces us into a state of dependence and then punishes us for being dependent. So we’ve _got_ to help each other where we can.”

From the look on Amy’s face, she couldn’t agree more, and she doesn’t know how well this sits with her.

(Amy and Zoe probably have a lot more in common than they think -- a polite disinterest in each other’s surface personalities keep them from seeing it.)

“Before I got the blues,” her voice is quieter now. “I worked with the Child Migrant Programme in the South Pacific, you know. City-cemeteries made for a lot of orphans. That was always the first priority, after a city got hit; find the children, get them out of the contaminated zones. One of our jobs -- what? Yeah, I was clergy,” she says in response to something Ian asks her, too low to be heard. Her eyes dart over to Simon, and her hand goes to her throat like she’s checking it for a collar. “The regular kind, not Buenakai, yeah. That came later, after I was exposed -- you get to thinking that you got chosen for something, but you don’t know what, so you go looking for answers.”

She looks back to Ian, and they nod at each other solemnly, with perfect understanding. Ian leans back, unconsciously shifting the kuffiyeh on his shoulders.

“And anyway, one of our jobs was to provide workshops for kids in transit -- like, for some, these were career workshops, which were s’posed to prepare them for the kind of jobs they could reasonably expect to find later in life, seeing as they were migrants living on the charity of the Pan-Pacific Alliance. Right, yeah, I know. What’s that called?”

“Paternalism,” Ngozi contributes.

“Right, that.”

There’s a sensation on the ends of Kieren’s fingertips, and for a second, he thinks it’s cold water and absently goes to shake it off.

Then he stops, and his frown lets go of his face as if released from a spring; he feels his eyebrows volley up, startled.

In the space between their chairs, Simon’s fingers find the spaces between his.

Their hands lace together.

“-- and I feel like it’s the same with us. There are things we can ‘reasonably expect’ to be based on our disadvantages, which have nothing to do with what we’re capable of. _Think_ of how much we can contribute based on our biology alone!”

With the pad of his thumb, Kieren presses into the topography of Simon’s hand, trying to see what he can distinguish without looking -- knuckles and nail beds, the soft fleshy bit by his thumb.

Unable to help it, he steals a sidelong glance. Simon’s in profile, his eyes tracking Zoe’s sharp gestures. They’re still hiding the maps from the supervisor with the arrangement of their bodies. The blue hue to Simon’s lips makes Kieren run his tongue unconsciously over the polyps inside his mouth, feeling them ache in phantom sympathy.

He wonders what Simon can feel.

He takes his nail and digs it in, hard, tracing a line on the inside of Simon’s finger, and is rewarded with the way his eyes widen fractionally.

“And it’s not just hard labour we’re good for. Can you imagine … say, training one of us to go up in space? Don’t have to worry about food or waste. We can’t feel the cold -- what if we were Arctic explorers? Poisonous animals, gas leaks, gunmen on the loose … doesn’t frighten us! We’d be _excellent_ rescue workers. If only we had the _chance!”_

There’s something on Simon’s palm.

Puzzled, Kieren stops feigning nonchalance and drags their hands up so he can inspect it, setting his clipboard in his lap so he has both hands free to spread Simon’s hand open, turning it up to the light.

A scar bisects his palm, looking exactly like someone had jaggedly carved the breach into his skin.

Kieren glances up to find Simon gazing steadily back at him, waiting. He frowns in question.

Simon leans in close.

“A pact,” he explains, in a voice so low Kieren has to lean in, too, to catch it. “If you want to know how I was contaminated with the Kaiju Blue, Kieren, you’re looking at it.”

Kieren flattens Simon’s hand out again to get a better look.

“A pact?” he echoes. “You … on purpose?”

In his peripheral, Simon nods.

“There were three of us,” he says. “The Buenakai do everything in threes, it’s our holiest number. Three came from the breach _’in its final hour, and it is three that shalt return’,_ it goes,” he gestures with the hand that Kieren doesn’t currently have pinned like a butterfly on a collection board. “We’re initiated in threes, ordained in threes, so most of our friendships followed in the same form.”

Kieren nods. He worries at the edges of the scar with his thumbs.

Outside of them, Amy says to Zoe feelingly, “You are _soppy,_ look at you, the soppy optimist, come here,” and gets up out of her chair. Zoe’s face takes on the same mortally offended expression that Kieren’s does whenever somebody accuses him of optimism, too.

A beat later, she realizes that Amy’s going in for a hug, and the expression turns to panic.

“Don’t you dare -- _ughhhh.”_

“We’d been ordained as priests right before the three-jaeger assault on the breach,” Simon explains in an undertone. “One year became two, and there was no sign that the kaiju overlords planned on punching through the barrier between our worlds and returning. Not as quickly as we needed them. My friends and I -- we got this idea that since the kaiju had been expelled from us, that it was our duty to go to them.”

_Are you kidding,_ Kieren thinks.

Simon has no trouble reading his expression. His eyebrows arch.

“We were in Singapore, then,” he continues. “Which -- while it wasn’t the open port that Hong Kong had been -- still had a thriving black market. Kaiju Blue in powdered form was attainable.”

Kieren lets go of his hand in order to shade his eyes.

“You have to understand,” Simon seems almost amused by his reaction. “Our lives had no direction. We were eschatologists whose apocalypse hadn’t come. We were the crazy cultists that the average person,” here, he digs his own nails into Kieren’s skin, pointedly. “Had the luxury of laughing at. We had nothing to lose. We thought, with the grace of the Kaiju Blue in our veins, we’d reincarnate, or otherwise somehow live on in the kaiju hive mind. We thought we were making gifts out of ourselves and delivering ourselves up. We wanted to be with our gods.”

“How did you figure that?”

“Think about it. The kaiju were engineered to be poisonous, both in life and in decomposition. We were meant to die from it, and if we died from the Kaiju Blue, it would make sense that our memories would go into the kaiju collective consciousness, the same way the kaiju themselves did. If no second invasion had yet come, we thought it was because they had to be laying low, gathering information.” He shrugs.

Kieren watches the expressions that appear and disappear under Simon’s eyebrows.

“But they died,” he guesses. “And you didn’t.”

Simon’s mouth pulls, rueful. “Ironically, me turning Zombie got me that much closer to the kaiju in life than I would have in death.” He curls his fingers so that the scar on his palm bunches, trapping Kieren’s fingers against it.

“Someday,” Zoe’s saying from somewhere. “They’re going to ask us what happened here, and I want you all to know exactly what it was.”

“I’m sorry about your friends,” Kieren says quietly, and the weight in his voice has Rick Macy’s gravestone on it.

Simon shakes his head. “Don’t be. I wouldn’t have met you or Amy or --“ his eyes dart towards the table. “-- or any of them, if I’d died.”

There are still Zombies sitting on top of the table, and others yet clustered around it; Ian’s bald skull, Ngozi’s braids done up in a whorl around her head, the cousins, Henry with his foot propped up on the arm of Amy’s chair. Simon looks at them for a long time, the corners of his eyes crinkling with affection.

Kieren studies his profile and wants to kiss him.

The sensation of height inside of him increases, because he can, can’t he? Because Simon looks at him the same way Frankie looks at Henry, the same way Phil can’t keep his eyes off Amy whenever she’s in a room. He can kiss Simon and Simon will let him.

“You’re staring,” Simon comments without looking.

“Yeah,” Kieren agrees.

His eyes flick back to him. In a rocky voice, he asks, “Can I help you with something, Kieren?” 

And Kieren reaches out without meaning to, touching the corner of Simon’s mouth to catch his name as it’s being said.

Simon flinches, and Kieren immediately curls his fingers away.

“Hurts?” he asks with regret.

“It’s fine,” Simon lies, his gaze dropping to Kieren’s mouth in a way that lets him know they’re on the same page. “It’s not bad.”

With the hand that isn’t tangled with Simon’s scarred one, Kieren unfurls his fingers against the side of his face, careful of the sore mouth. His fingertips feather against Simon’s eyebrow, the ridge of bone where there’d be phosphorescent growths if this were one of his hallucination-dreams, and Simon leans to chase the touch, seemingly on instinct.

He shifts forward, and Kieren tilts his head up, and --

“Walker! Monroe!” the supervisor bellows from across the room, and they spring apart in alarm. “ _Fuck off!”_

Wildly, they look around, the world newly reformed: Amy’s bright teeth, everybody’s faces turned towards them, laughing.

“ _Shame!”_ Zoe admonishes them, her hand flattened to her chest in mock-offense. The maps, of course, have disappeared, as easily as if they never were. “You haven’t even invited him around for brunch yet!”

“Yeah, we’ll get on that,” Kieren tells her, wry.

“Sorry,” Simon adds. The only place they’re still touching is their hands, netted together between their chairs.

And Ngozi, leaning casually against the table, murmurs, “Les monsters aussi tombent amoureux.”

“Hm?” Simon blinks at her.

Brian bends down to murmur something in Amy’s ear, and Kieren absently translates, “She’s talking about monsters who -- wait, are you using ‘aussi’ to mean ‘also’?”

“Yeah,” Amy says to Brian. “Now?”

He shrugs, and she uncrosses her legs, getting to her feet.

She glances back. “Kieren, come with me, will you?”

“-- too. Huh? Oh.” He disentangles his fingers from Simon’s, standing. “Yeah.”

Gathering up his clipboard with his jaeger designs doodled all over the reports, he glances back once to make sure it’s fine, but Simon’s already being reabsorbed in the group, as Ngozi and Ian Kugler shift their body language to include him. He meets Kieren’s eye, wrecked mouth pulling at the corner, and then his whole face crinkles when Amy swings over the chair and gives him a showy kiss on the cheek. Kieren’s too embarrassed to do the same.

He follows Amy and Brian past the supervisor’s station out into the corridor. The man himself gives Kieren a scowl as he goes by -- Amy wants to warn him that his face would get stuck like that, but privately, Kieren thinks it wouldn’t change the scenery much.

The three of them go up the stairwell, and up again, past the mens’ levels and onto the womens’.

“Where are we going?” Kieren asks, suddenly nervous. This is one area of the garrisons he’s never been.

He’s been thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, but take him to where the women Zombies sleep and _now_ he’s freaked.

Get a grip, Walker.

“I wanted to show you something,” Amy tells him. “I know they tell you you can’t keep secrets from your drift partner, but I want to see if you could do it by accident.”

Kieren turns his head and looks back at Brian, who shrugs unhelpfully.

They lead him to a bunkroom at the end of the corridor that Kieren knows instinctively used to be Amy’s, before they evicted her and moved her to the administrator’s building with Kieren and the Russian brothers to have them close at hand. It’s empty except for two A-shifters who are deep asleep; Kieren can just make out a hand sticking out from underneath the blanket closest to him, and the big black staples that track across the back of it.

Amy’s bunk is stripped bare, same as his, since there won’t be anybody to fill them until the next rotation.

Except there’s a box in the center of her mattress.

Brian reaches inside his coat just as Amy lifts the lid.

At first, all Kieren sees is rags. Grey rags. Everybody recycles on the rig, because it’s necessity, and almost all the labourers create their dress-down greys out of the tattered, shredded remains of each other’s uniforms. And their uniforms get shredded a lot.

And then Amy tips the box so she can pull its contents out, and Kieren feels his eyes go wide.

“That’s a dress,” he says blankly.

Brian kneels and Amy lifts so that he can tug the hem of the dress towards him, layering the fabric he’d brought with him over a bare patch. 

The dress is labourer-grey, the bodice a rescued buckled jacket, high-collared and sleek along the biceps, and the skirt is uneven and handkerchiefed, and for all that it’s literally rags it still manages to look fae. Intentionally. He steps in closer; they aren’t allowed access to sewing supplies unsupervised, so how --

He blinks, brought up short.

The hem is shorter in the front, longer in the back. There’s a train.

“You made a _wedding_ dress?”

Amy watches his face avidly, her arms outstretched to their full extent so she can lift the dress high enough for Brian to get at its hem. Her fingers curl, proprietary and proud. “You really had no idea?”

He shakes his head, dumbfounded. “None.”

If it was in the drift, this project of Amy’s, then it manifested itself some other way.

Her eyes tilt at the corners, pleased. “Zoe was pretty specific about it,” she says. “She wanted it made out of our clothes. You know how she’s got that patchwork jacket she wears all the time? She wanted her dress made that way too.”

He stares at her.

She shrugs. “It’s metaphorical or something. I didn’t ask.”

Kieren has so many questions, he doesn’t know where to start.

Well, okay. That’s a lie.

“Why does Zoe need a wedding dress?” blurts out of him, his eyes shifting from Amy to the back of Brian’s balding head and back again. A snuffle-snort comes from the sleeping woman in the bunk above their heads, and he obligingly lowers his voice. “Zoe’s getting _married?”_

“She is.”

Upon diagnosis, Zombie citizenship with their home countries is promptly revoked, turning metaphorical alienation into a literal kind, and a technicality of having no citizenship means it’s illegal for Zombies to marry anybody. Somehow, this seems like the least of the problems at the forefront of Kieren’s mind.

“I --“ he stutters. “I didn’t know she -- she -- has a fiancé?”

He turns his brain upside down, shaking out its contents, but the only person he’s seen Zoe spend an inordinate amount of time with is Brian, which okay, if that’s what --

“Oh, she does,” Amy tells him confidently. “I don’t think he knows yet, but she does.”

“I started making it for her last year,” Brian volunteers in his froggy way, and he nods his head at Amy. “But I don’t have the eye that this girl here does. It’s a good thing she came along.”

Amy shows teeth, shyly pleased.

“She’s got a talent for taking rags and making -- well --“ he lifts the raggedy, no-sew hem and shrugs, like its beauty defies his ability to express it.

_You have no idea,_ Kieren thinks.

Out loud, he says, “It makes more sense if you know that when Amy’s not in greys, she has a tendency to dress like a grandmother’s carpet.”

Amy’s jaw drops, insulted, and then she pauses, thinks about it, and tips her head, like, _actually._

“It really is amazing,” Kieren tells her with quiet wonder. “God, Amy.”

Amy Dyer took all of their castoff, torn-up prison greys and she’s making a dress out of them.

Of course she made a dress.

She beams at him, and says, “Well,” feigning casualness. “I always did want a wedding, handsome. I never specified that it had to be my own.”

 

*

 

The blue tumbles all around him, a spinning, cartwheeling cacophony of a current, and with the ease of practice, Kieren puts stepping stones beneath his feet and balances there in the midst of the drift. Sounds and memories jumble all around him.

Now that he knows what he’s looking for, the evidence of Amy’s project is everywhere; it’s a permeating feeling of satisfaction and significance -- to Amy, creating Zoe’s dress justifies her, just as much as being Kieren’s co-pilot does.

A RABIT darts by, the flick and dip of a cottontail in the stream.

Kieren doesn’t mean to chase it, but that’s the thing about RABITs: they contain strong emotional lures and this one is doused with affection for him. Before he knows it, he’s turning around like he’s heard his name called across a distance and the next thing he knows, he’s in the memory.

The corridor materializes around him, a fire door drifting shut with a solid thunk to his right.

Amy whisks around him, dressed in greys and carrying an armful of the same, her eyes unfocused and distant, and she’s just about to round the corner when she comes to an abrupt halt. She stands like that, poised and frozen, her shadow just barely stretching across the grating, and then she flattens herself against the wall.

Voices float to them from around the corner; Kieren hears Zoe, all heat and flash-fire, and then Simon’s low rumble, answering.

Amy turns her head so as to better eavesdrop, not breathing.

Kieren, who’s only observer in this memory, not participant, steps around her. The boots of his drive suit make no sound, and neither does his own breathing inside his helmet.

“-- does the Prophet say?” Zoe tilts her head up, her jaw tightening. Her eyes are very bright. “Did you talk to him?”

“I have.” 

Compared to hers, Simon’s voice eddies between them, slow and still.

“… _and?”_ Zoe presses, when he doesn’t contribute anything else. “Did you ask him?”

“The Prophet doesn’t like to be questioned, Zoe.”

“Well, then he’s not a very good priest, is he?” she flashes back. “If he doesn’t like questions. Would he support us?”

“I have no doubt he would. He knows more about the kaiju and their motives than anyone. Anyone left alive, that is -- Newton Geiszler perhaps -- anyway. He wouldn’t lead us astray.”

Zoe folds her arms, her expression corkscrewing with frustration. 

“No,” she agrees. “He just won’t lead us _anywhere.”_

“Zoe.” Simon steps into her space, so she has nowhere to look but up at him, and Kieren knows from experience how unsettling that is, bearing the brunt of Simon’s attention. “The Prophet is one who is not motivated by greed or self-aggrandizement, which makes his motivations very hard to parse. I trust him. If he’s in a position to help you, he won’t, and I trust that he has a reason.”

Behind them, the fire door loudly thunks open, and Amy startles, nearly upending her box of rags.

Another Zombie steps out of the stairwell, turning in the other direction seemingly without spotting Amy at all. The door slides shut, and in Amy’s memory it’s thunderously overloud, but Simon and Zoe aren’t paying attention.

“-- not our fault they’re afraid of us!” Zoe’s saying, with zeal in her voice. She is an inexhaustible source of it. “It’s not our fault they’re scapegoating us. None of that’s our fault, Simon, and we can’t wait for the kaiju to punch through the breach and annihilate them. We can’t wait for the kaiju to do it for us. I don’t want to wait for the Second Rising. We have to act! _We.”_

“I don’t disagree,” Simon’s voice stays mild. “I can’t even fault your plan.”

“Why do you say that like you don’t want to be a part of it?”

Neatly, cleanly, and nearly without blood, this slides home, and a pause follows.

His eyes flick away, and Zoe Kelly isn’t a stupid person.

“The pilots,” she says.

“I’m scared for them,” Simon’s voice is at its lowest register, a matchstick drag on phosphorus. “Zoe, what will they do to them? At best, they’ll turn into bargaining pieces --“ She scoffs, and for the first time, his voice rises. “ _Zoe._ For the first time, we’re _powerful,_ and that’s only as long as we have them. They’re too important to risk.”

“To you.”

“To you, too -- they’re your _friends._ When did you lose sight of that?”

“That,” Zoe says stiffly, “is not fair.”

Another pause.

Kieren glances back at the listening Amy and the expression on her face.

And then Zoe says, “Amy got Brian to talk again, did I ever tell you that?”

She glances up, and Simon tilts his head, his brow puckering with curiosity.

“After what happened to us -- I don’t know how they did it in Singapore, but the head-hunters used to comb through our city-cemetery in packs. Large numbers of us had accumulated there, and they knew it -- we were easier to freight in bulk, so after they captured us, they’d keep us in these cages until the PPDC arrived. Trapper cages, like the kind you use on wildlife.”

She unfolds her arms, shuffles her feet, refolds them.

“Brian didn’t have much to say after that, and Amy -- Amy gave him something to talk about. And what Kieren did for Freddie Preston on the Wall …” She gives her head a shake, platinum blonde hair shivering everywhere. “I’d follow them. We all would.”

And Simon, gently: “They wouldn’t want any harm to come to us.”

And Zoe, grudgingly: “Yeah, I know.”

And from behind him: “Kieren.”

He looks back.

Two Amys stand in the corridor: the one who belongs here in the memory, her back still flattened against the wall, oblivious to the intrusion, and Amy in a drive suit, looking right at him, the glow off her eyes forming pinpricks of light on the inside of her helmet. The standby light on her HUD blinks at him. 

From somewhere, Kieren hears the caterwauling sound of the drift, and slowly becomes aware -- his own agitation, the locked hydraulics in his shoulder.

The memory crumbles away, disappearing into the blue.

Redeemer Blue isn’t a proper jaeger, so they don’t have to worry about Blue going Gipsy Danger and almost plasma-blasting a Shatterdome, but that doesn’t stop Blue from trying to express their distress in any way it knows how.

“You all right?” Amy asks, bolstering him up with her own calm.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Come on,” she says. “If we fall out of alignment even once, we’re out, you know that.”

“Yeah,” he says again.

 

*

 

The dreams, when they come, are terrible; a hot-burning sun and a world with a wavering atmosphere, threatened and near-dying in the burning face of the red supergiant, helium-3 exploding and gaseous iron making mirages and a man-shaped creature drifting downwards towards him like a doll or a spider descending on a filament of webbing.

Kieren is awake when he sees it, sees it and identifies it -- that’s a jaeger, that’s Gipsy Danger, that’s the very last jaeger there will ever be until Redeemer Blue wakes up in the space between Kieren and Amy’s minds and says hello -- and Kieren is -- 

\-- awake when he lifts his head and Gipsy Danger detonates, Kieren is awake -- 

\-- when the nuclear blast rips his skin from his muscles and his muscles from his bones, Kieren is awake and --

\-- opening his mouth to scream and the awful, obliterating pain of his death ricochets into their collective consciousness and --

He hits the ground belly-first.

Winded, he gulps airlessly at the darkness of the room. It takes a long moment for the familiar landmarks to materialize around him, emerging like icebergs in the Bering Sea; the legs of the chair, Amy’s grey trousers in a puddle, the industrial carpet underneath his palms and the pale strip of night lighting up near the ceiling. 

With his kaiju eyes, the lack of lighting doesn’t matter. His breath rattles shakily in his lungs.

Nightmare. Hallucination. Whatever. It’s over now.

The muscles in his arms tremble with the memory of being ripped apart, lurid in its detail, and he pushes himself up anyway. He glances up and spots the curve of Amy’s bare arm and the dark spread of her hair over her pillow; he hasn’t woken her up, then. Sometimes the chaos in his brain is enough to snap her awake on its own, like they’re both rubber bands stretched out.

They don’t have a washroom, because why would they need it, but there’s a long table with a sink in it that makes Kieren think maybe this room used to be part of a laboratory set up before it got repurposed. He flicks it on and runs his hands under the stream, splashing his face until it acknowledges the cold, something approaching a sensation. He scrubs at his eyes, but the halo of the dying sun is still a bruised red-purple stain on the inside of his eyelids.

“Do you think we’ll ever be like them?”

Amy’s voice startles him like a tap on the back.

“Like who?” he asks, twisting the water off.

With a soft slithering sound, she sits up and swings her legs off the side of the bunk, pushing herself out so she can drop. She lands in the same spot Kieren had fallen, and crosses to the closet. He towels his hands and face dry until she surfaces again.

Between the two of them, they have exactly three precious possessions.

The first is a fold-out map from the National Rail. Dotted train lines dissect the United Kingdom like blood vessels in a heart. It’s been folded against the grain so that the section with Lancashire County faces upward; it’s the only piece of home either of them have. Kieren smuggled it in with him from the Lamon Bay camp, hidden in his clothes.

The second is a postcard. Whenever he handles it, he somehow expects the front to be Van Gogh, but it isn’t. It’s the stock logo of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics -- the back reads, _I wish you could be here, babe! It’s crazy how different everything is Pacific-side. hope your feeling better, xo xo,_ but a creeping water stain had obliterated the signature and the postscript.

The third is a cut-out from a magazine, and it’s this Amy turns around with, rubbing the worried corners until they lie flat.

She stares down at it, her expression hungry, and Kieren doesn’t need to see it to know what she sees: it’s the iconic picture of Mako Mori and Raleigh Beckett after they blew up the breach, two lone survivors sitting small and adrift among a sea of debris, their heads bent so close they almost touch. They are utterly oblivious to their surroundings.

“Like them how?” he asks, taking his time rehanging the towel so he can avoid that look in her eyes. “Healthy? Living in France? _Real_ Rangers?”

“No, dumb dumb,” says Amy patiently. “That _secure.”_

He pauses, slowly tugging the towel so that it’s unnecessarily straight. Then he turns around and says, “Hey.”

She looks up, and he extends his arms.

Her expression turns wry, the corners of her mouth and eyes curling up like the corners of the glossy magazine paper in her hands. “Kieren Walker, you’re soppy.”

He just widens his arms a little more, until she rolls her eyes and puts the photo back. He meets her halfway, their arms going around each other in the seamless way of best friends, of drift partners. She squeezes him back tightly, sighing.

He puts his mouth against her temple and loves her with all his heart.

_They can’t make us kaiju,_ he thinks. _The kaiju can’t make us their parasites. Humanity can’t make us their enemies or their scapegoats. They can try all they want, but we’ll never be that. We’re too human._

 

* 

 

At the end of the week, as Kieren’s pulling on his boots and Amy keeps touching the dip of her upper lip, frowning -- “you’re not,” he assures her, seeing no black blood, and her brows pull tighter together, “it _feels_ like I am” -- a technician in a navy shirt cards open their door and tells them the dive is cancelled for the day.

“Why?” Kieren lets the tongue of his second boot fall.

“Some PPDC officer has an appointment with the foreman,” the tech says. “They’ve noticed.”

Next to him, Amy makes a stifled noise of surprise, and Kieren feels a kick in his chest like his lethargic heart is trying to accelerate. They both nod, understanding the sudden secrecy. The PPDC will immediately confiscate anything that remotely resembles jaeger tech, so they’re going to come and the foreman is going to talk cheerfully about the success of the purification pumps (“surprise!”) without going into details about _how_ they’re successful, and then he’ll find some way to squeeze money out of the rock that is the Pan-Pacific Alliance. He’ll be good at that part: people trust greed the way they trust little else.

Kieren wants to ask what they’re supposed to do instead, but at the same time he doesn’t, just in case they haven’t thought of it. He doesn’t want to be put back on the Wall for the day.

“Thank you,” he says carefully, and when the tech nods, adds, “We’ll stay out of sight.”

This is satisfactory. The tech backs out and the door beeps shut again.

Amy and Kieren look at each other. They finish dressing, leaving the plated armor of the drive-suits behind, and walk down the hall to the ready room. If there’s an inspection, this room will be ignored with careful disinterest. It’s hard to hide something the size of Redeemer Blue, so they’ll just pretend there’s nothing _to_ hide and hopefully the PPDC officer will be thinking of nothing but how quickly they can get back to civilization.

Kieren brings the thriller that Mahmoud passed to him after a football match -- the sequel to the one Ian Kugler had been reading in their bunk room that day that Simon had tried to warn them about the Relay Gel. Amy fishes out one of the small iron weights from when they’d tested drift compatibility, and they start tossing it back and forth to each other without looking as he reads aloud.

The bubble of calm bursts when, a few hours into their morning, the door slides open and two K-scientists scuttle in.

Everybody spots everybody else in the same moment. 

“Gah!”

At first, panic reduces the intruders to their coats and their threat, but it passes in a beat and then Oliver and Nina are recognizable again.

Amy starts laughing first, hands hiding her face.

“Suppose scary monsters can’t help being scary monsters,” comments Oliver carelessly, bent double to get his speeding heart to slow. He grins up at them with the expression of a man who’s used to people not laughing at his jokes.

“Too true,” Kieren murmurs. 

Nina hears him, and she darts him a look that is simultaneously warning and approving.

She fills them in on what’s happening with Commander Martin, while Oliver recovers and steals into the observation room. The PPDC officer is sharper than they’d like, more politician than military, and they hoped that the foreman hoodwinked her well enough, but they’ve got Phil Wilson blundering and bumbling around her now, trying to ingratiate himself. Show her greed, show her ambition, and carefully don’t show her the enormous droid they’ve been using to clean the sea for them.

“What happens if the PPDC decide to investigate further?”

She shrugs. “All our technology gets confiscated, some people get arrested for theft of intellectual property -- that’s what J-tech is, they’re very jealous and protective of it -- and the Aleutian goes back to being the armpit of the PPDC.”

“And we go back on the Wall,” Amy says quietly, and Kieren swallows like there’s a cage door closing in his throat.

After they leave, she’s silent for a long time, sitting cross-legged and rolling the weight back and forth from one hand to the other.

Then she stands, and says, “I’m going to go talk to Phil.”

He isn’t surprised. “About?”

“Ambition,” she says enigmatically.

Kieren opens his mouth and then hesitates, uncertain how to proceed. “Amy,” he starts, and she turns her face in his direction, waiting. “You and he aren’t …”

It takes her a moment. “Oh. No,” she shrugs.

He thinks he probably knew that, but knowing it isn’t knowing _why._ The shape Phil Wilson makes in the blue isn’t at all like the burning coronas that silhouette Delilah Doolittle or Rick Macy, isn’t even the landmark-touchstone-anchor of Simon. If he had to put words to it, then Phil exists in that shared world the same way a color would; something to occasionally admire -- “look how blue the sky is today,” “oh, wow, you’re right” -- but otherwise background. If it’s love, it’s more a shade of love than love itself.

“He’s too,” Amy tries to explain. “We’re too -- he’s, well, he’s got authority over me, doesn’t he? If he wants me off the Wall, I’m off the Wall. If he wants me on the Wall, I’m on the Wall. If he decides to put me at the top of the Wall until I fall apart or fall to my death, nobody bats an eyelash. So it’s … yeah,” she shrugs again, like maybe she cares but she’s trying to dust it off.

A beat, and then a small smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “He says he likes my eyes.”

“That sounds …” _like a fetish,_ he thinks, but doesn’t finish.

The smile fades. 

“Yeah,” she agrees.

Then she draws herself up and tosses her head, “Anyway! He’s the kind of guy you only love when you’ve got no other options, you know? Like,” not even the lightness of her tone can bely what she’s saying. “When you’re at the point where something that’s barely even palatable suddenly looks pleasing because you’re so desperate.”

There’s nothing to say to that, and she crosses the ready room to drop the iron weight into his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he settles on, curling his fingers around the weight. “That you ever felt that desperate. You shouldn’t have to.”

“Oh,” her eyes crinkle up, delighted with him. He can hear the word _soppy_ without her having to say it. “Don’t be daft, Kieren Walker. I’ve got all of this now,” she crouches down to rap her knuckles against the side of his head, and then his ribs, and her voice lilts up, singsong. “There’s a whole lot of love in here, I don’t think I’ll ever go without. You’re stuck with me, I’m afraid. Best friends for life.”

“Oh, really?” But he’s smiling back, and his chest still feels warm after she leaves, like maybe it’s full.

Then he’s alone in the ready room, sitting with his back to the observation room window and his legs thrown out in front of him. The iron weight hefts back and forth between his hands seemingly of its own accord, and the whole room smells like the sea. He’s been alone plenty since Norfolk, and that was mostly when he was surrounded by people, but this is a different kind of alone: the kind that comes without work or urgency or loneliness. 

The feeling in his chest, that almost-joy, keeps expanding. He leans his head back and closes his eyes.

When he opens them again to the mute vibrations of approaching footsteps, he somehow isn’t surprised to see labourer greys come to a halt in front of him.

His eyes track up to Simon’s face, and he smiles, his heart still buoyed up on that contentment. It flips without effort.

Simon sits down across from him, drawing his legs up to make room for them both on the grating, and Kieren unconsciously checks to make sure his hair is lying flat and presentable.

Catching him at it, Simon exposes teeth. It lifts years off of him, that grin.

“I have been reliably informed,” he says, his eyes crinkled at their corners. “That of the two people in this room, _somebody’s_ hair is terrible and it isn’t yours.”

“Hey,” Kieren protests. And, quickly, “Isn’t it almost the end of shift? Don’t you have church?”

“Yes.”

This is all he volunteers, and Kieren lifts his eyebrows.

He wants to ask how Simon got in here -- labourers aren’t allowed access to this part of the rig, Kieren and Amy excluded -- but there are several possible answers to that: it could have been Amy, or Nina who’d remember him from the episode with the hyperbaric chamber, or even Phil, wanting to keep the kaiju priest and the PPDC officer separate.

“Don’t you need to be getting ready?” he asks instead.

A shrug. “There are other priests.”

This is news to Kieren. Then again, as he thinks about it, maybe it isn’t -- the inmate with the pulse who was always on musical accompaniment when he was there had a clerical collar, didn’t she? And the church had existed before Simon arrived.

It’s … possible that Kieren’s been single-minded.

Simon’s eyes haven’t left his face yet, so he catches Kieren’s rueful smile. “What?” he wants to know.

“Nothing,” Kieren answers, and then, “Well, yes, actually, I have a question.”

Simon schools his expression into one of readiness -- you can’t give someone more of your attention when they already have all of it. “Shoot.”

Kieren looks directly at him. “Do you really believe that the kaiju are going to come back? That we’ll be at war again?”

A pause. Slowly, his shoulders go back, pressing against the wall behind him as he considers the question. It takes him a long time to formulate a reply, for which Kieren’s glad: he doesn’t want it to be an easy thing to answer.

“Belief,” Simon says, very quiet, and huffs out a self-deprecating laugh, throat bobbing against the blue of his clerical collar. “What do I believe? I believe that the kaiju -- specifically, the overlords who bred the kaiju as exterminators -- they have the advantage. They know how to get to us, where we still don’t know how to get to them. The element of surprise is theirs, should they ever recover. I believe they _won’t_ accept defeat.”

Kieren remembers, suddenly, the dream -- hallucination -- memory he had of the horror of Gipsy Danger detonating. It’s as vivid and detailed as the day he lived it, shocked straight down to the core of the kaiju collective consciousness.

“Do you believe,” he hears himself say. “That they’ll come back to cleanse the earth?”

Simon looks at him.

“Do you believe that they’re gods, and we are made in their image? Do you believe that we’re at our most divine state when we’re feral?”

A priest’s job is to know, and there are a lot of things about the kaiju that’s known with scientific certainty, but that isn’t one of them. He doesn’t lie. “I like the idea of their return. I want us to not have to suffer anymore.”

Kieren thinks of his little sister, and has a sudden memory of her ponytail swinging behind her under florescent lights in the Shop-n-Save, her pushing a trolley and chorusing, _do we have enough points for raviolis, then, mum?_

He thinks of the last time he saw her, and the smiling frogs on her socks.

He says, “If the kaiju come back to annihilate humanity, we’ll suffer.”

“I know,” says Simon, with sympathy in his voice, like he knows exactly who Kieren’s thinking about.

They sit in silence. Simon’s eyes track along the ceiling of the ready room, its utilitarian beams and broad lighting, and Kieren can see him gathering his thoughts, so he waits. The whites of Simon’s eyes are stained the color of antifreeze, his irises a darker, luminous shade of blue.

Slowly, in that voice of his like he’s dragging it up from somewhere impossibly deep, he says, “I believe the heavens are full of many things -- aliens and gods and monsters, all -- and maybe some of them have an interest in us. But.”

And here, he tips his knee so that it bumps against Kieren’s. Eyes dropping to meet his, he smiles.

“But I believe in a great many things on earth, too.”

“Good,” Kieren says, and then clears his throat and has to try again, because his voice came out sounding like it, too, had been plumbed from an unfathomable depth, froggy and scraped raw. “Good, that’s. Good.”

Simon’s still smiling at him, the way people do when they have no intention of stopping, and Kieren’s overcome with the memory of Simon’s hands around the back of his neck, mouth spreading open to devour his completely, and it, too, burns at the inside of his throat like a detonation.

A noise in the hallway makes them draw together instinctively, knees bumping, and Kieren blinks and says, “Shouldn’t you be getting to church?”

“Yeah,” Simon agrees, and doesn’t get up.

“They won’t like it if you don’t show. Most people come for you, you know,” Kieren points out, because it’s only fair. Honesty for honesty.

An expression that could almost be called shy crosses Simon’s face. “You think so?”

“Yeah.” Kieren mentally unfurls their social map and studies all its landmarks, thinking of how the Buenakai means something different to all of them; faith and friendship for Amy, belonging for Frankie, knowledge in an uncertain world for Ian Kugler, a welcoming space for Henry to practice his talent, and strength for Zoe who needs to believe Zombies won’t be underdogs forever. “You make them believe. Or,” he corrects himself. “They already believe, and you make it safe for them to.”

Silence greets this, and Kieren looks away from where he’d been watching the door to find Simon looking at him with an expression like --

Like something, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have a name for it -- it makes him feel self-conscious and completely unselfconscious at the same time, flushing him both hot and cold.

“What,” he says.

Simon gestures.

“What,” says Kieren again, pleased.

The expression on his face is luminous, and his voice makes Kieren want to stand at the edge of it and look down, “Don’t make me say it.”

“Well, now I have to.”

And Simon obeys.

“Come here,” comes out of him, throaty, and Kieren smiles, and rolls his shoulders. The iron weight, he finds, is still in his hands, so he sets it aside and then pulls his legs in under him and rises up onto his knees, one hand on Simon’s leg for balance. Every movement feels exact, peculiar, like it takes so much more of his attention than it should. 

He’s never been more aware.

It’s like being attached at the mind to Redeemer Blue; that feeling of his skin being made of something it isn’t, of being so much larger than he really is.

Simon stretches his hand out, mid-gesture, and Kieren says, “what?” for a third time, and, completely unable to help the way even his voice is smiling, “yes, can I help you?” and then Simon’s fingers close around his sleeve.

And then it’s no trouble at all, to let himself be pulled in.

They draw their legs up together so that Kieren nearly straddles Simon’s thigh, and Simon lifts himself off the wall just as Kieren sinks down to meet him. There’s a part of him that expects an interruption right now, right this very second, just to continue the trend -- and when it doesn’t come, the victory of that alone makes him moan, low and pleased.

He braces himself on Simon’s shoulders, one hand finding the short hairs at the back of his neck, and then he falls into the kiss.

Or rises in it. It’s hard to tell; there’s a peculiar lack of gravity inside his chest.

Simon’s hands go to his jaw, drawing him in closer, and his mouth is open and devouring at once, a kiss that doesn’t wait for a kiss back. It’s a kiss that requires attention from his whole body. He grips harder at Simon’s skull and tries to give it back.

Thumbs drift restlessly at Kieren’s cheeks, his ears, his quiet pulse point.

“Simon,” Kieren says, speaking against his upper lip.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.” He just wanted the name in his throat, in his teeth. Simon Monroe believes in gods in heaven and in gods on earth, and Simon Monroe believes in Kieren Walker.

All of this is familiar and unfamiliar territory. Kieren has never kissed anyone for this long, but Amy has, and she’s an echo under his skin, a knowledge that he’s here, with another person, and he could put his mouth on that person’s eyelid or ear or neck and they might not even stop him. He has the knowledge, the ghost of Amy’s partners around him, but the sensation of it is entirely new. Muted, too, of course, because he’s a Zombie and Zombies don’t have many of those receptors left, but he moves his lips across Simon’s cheek and Simon tips his head to follow the movement and this, somehow, floors him. 

It astonishes him, that he could be here and Simon, too.

How can people stand it, he thinks. How can you touch someone and feel this much and not _die_ from it.

They’ve sunk down an uncomfortable amount, so Simon skates a hand down his back and the other goes to the floor so that he can push them both up. Kieren lets himself be moved and murmurs, “You’re going to miss church.”

“Yeah,” Simon says, and kisses him.

Kieren smiles and settles against Simon’s body and keeps smiling until there’s too much kissing going on to be able to. The blue light from their eyes keeps blinking across their noses, their cheeks, as their eyes open and shut and open again. Kieren’s hand drifts down from Simon’s hair, and he rests two fingers over his clerical collar.

“Hey,” he says, and waits until Simon makes a noise and pulls himself together, focusing on him obligingly. “May I?”

He moves his fingers, hooking them over his collar, and slowly, slowly, Simon starts to smile.

“If you must,” he allows, in a voice so deep Kieren’s sure he could throw something small into it, like his heart, and never hear it reach bottom.

He dips his mouth in order to be kissed again, and with one hand, he flips the tab on the collar and pulls it through.

 

*

 

The next day is a disaster.

Okay, Kieren might be exaggerating. 

(Kieren is probably exaggerating.)

It’s actually shaping up to be an average day, albeit the kind of average day that can only follow the visit of a suspicious PPDC officer: everybody in the room moves with the sudden awareness that their time is limited. Redeemer Blue and the purification project in the Bering Sea is a monopoly they won’t be able to hold on to forever.

But Kieren’s preoccupied. 

Kieren has a lot of strategic avoiding to do. He doesn’t know _why_ he assumed the ready room would just cease to exist now that he’s had sex in it.

It didn’t, and now there are _technicians_ and _diagnostic personnel_ and _scientists_ heedlessly bustling over the place where, not even a full twenty-four hours ago, Kieren had put Simon flat on his back. He can still feel the phantom sensation of the grating on his skin.

“You all right, Kaz?” Oliver squints at him.

Kieren takes his helmet from him and swallows. “Yeah, fine.”

Behind the observation glass, Phil Wilson wears a particularly pinched expression that only softens when he lifts his head to look at them, leaning into the microphone to ask, “Ready?”

Kieren and Amy give him a thumbs-up.

“Initiating neural handshake in five … four …”

On the other side of the tumble, memories of kaiju and Delilah and the City of Flowers jigsawing into place with the ease of practice, a RABIT darts out in front of them -- a dip and a flip in the endless blue. In his peripheral, Kieren sees Amy’s head turn after it, sensing something, and he knows what it has to be just as she turns back to him with her eyebrows raised in a perfect, _perfect_ arch.

“I don’t want to chase that, do I?” she asks dryly.

He reaches across their shared mindspace, cautious, but the feelings coming off of her are exasperation and amusement and that familiar jealous-proud feeling that you always get whenever your friends’ relationships change.

“Yeah, please don’t,” he says.

Just as the floor starts to crank back to drop them into Blue’s cockpit, the door behind the observation room bursts open, and a tech barrels in with a desperate look on her face.

She’s clearly audible inside their helmets: “Okay, which of you was here yesterday? Who _fucked_ with the coffee-maker?”

Amy darts another arched look at Kieren, and Kieren groans.

 

*

 

The dive is routine, if long to make up for yesterday’s cancelation. Blue goes out in a spiral, radiating outward from the rig and scouting the landscape, testing the water and collecting soil samples from the standard points to bring back to the K-scientists. Blue’s arms have a specific modification just for this: it’s one thing to dive and install a purification pump, but it’s equally important to monitor its effects.

“And see, this is why I wanted to go to art school,” Kieren comments dryly to Amy as they eyeball the HUD over his arm, which is currently calculating the chemical make-up of the water sample to see if its Antigen K content has changed any. “This is really monotonous.”

“That’s science for you,” Amy replies, unsympathetic.

By the time they return, the rig is the only other lighted thing for miles, and Amy suddenly stops them just shy of the bay doors.

“Do you hear that?” she asks, and now that she has him listening, of course he can.

If he hadn’t been connected to Blue for most of the day, he would frown, but droids can’t frown and so Kieren forgets to. “Is that singing?”

“That’s a kaiju hymn, that is,” Amy agrees.

They turn Blue around and paddle back the way they came.

Before being adapted as a base for the Wall of Life operation, the Aleutian had been a petrol-pumping rig for an American oil company, and remnants of this incarnation is still visible in its design. The Bay, the garrison, the administration building; they all had to be repurposed and recycled.

They break the surface, following the tiny current of sound.

It’s a lot like that exercise in the not-a-Kwoon, Kieren remembers suddenly; trying to pinpoint Amy’s location blindfolded, purely by the sound of her voice.

“There,” she says.

They zero in on the viewfinder, magnifying until Henry Lonsdale’s shape becomes distinguishable, nestled in high in the struts of the radio tower, his blue eyes turned out to sea. The song, which carries clearly across the ice, comes from him.

“Oh, Henry,” says Kieren quietly.

The radio tower is to the Aleutian what the lookout ridge on the edge of town had been to Roarton, or that one infamous broom closet had been at Lamon Bay; it’s where labourers go when they want to be _alone._ (Not everybody, of course, could have circumstances line up to give them the ready room free and the cameras off.)

All the lights on the tower point up and out as a warning to overhead aircraft, and the well-illuminated helicopter landing pad sits just beyond it, so the area at the tower’s base is dimly lit and ill-supervised, a convenient dumping ground for empty pallets and bales of crushed cardboard that makes for all sorts of nooks. With the exception of the showers (Kieren has heard things) and occasionally the bunks if you wanted to be _that person_ who locked everybody else out (Chuckles, and only the once,) it’s the most private place on the rig.

For somewhere like the Aleutian, which is so isolated that there’s no harm in letting labourers have free reign on their off-hours, fraternizing as an infraction doesn’t even appear on the radar. It’s one of the few things labourers aren’t punished for (embarrassed, yes; punished, no,) not here or in any of the camps Kieren’s been through; condoms had been part of their rations since day one.

Kieren never made much use of the tower, but sometimes when Frankie climbed up this high, all it meant was that she wanted someone to come up and sit with her until she stopped being so overwhelmed. Kieren always went -- neither of them knew if Frankie’s mood swings were hormonal (do teenage Zombies get hormonal?) or a product of circumstance. Either way, he empathized. 

Amy nudges him with her mind, and they brace Blue’s struts against the cement pillars holding the rig in place.

Slowly, Redeemer Blue rises out of the sea, and Henry chokes off mid-song.

His face, round-mouthed and completely colorless, tracks it up, up, up.

Shift changeover isn’t for a few hours yet, so there isn’t a lot of foot traffic crossing between the buildings; just insomniacs and some labourers out salting the tarmac, and they stop dead in their tracks to stare, shielding their faces against the sea spray coming off Blue’s hull. 

Slowly, Henry stands, balanced easily on the structure in the comfortable way labourers are when suspended over nothing.

Blue has a klaxon horn but no megaphone, so they’ve no way to communicate. Instead, they focus a single floodlight on him and settle down to wait.

After a minute or two, Henry’s voice starts up again, wavering and small but growing fast.

When the hymn ends, he pauses, and then begins another. The wind snatches it out of his mouth, blowing it out to sea where the ice moves about slowly, and he stays like that for the length of a whole new song, one small person with an offering in front of a jaeger.

Later, after they’ve broken the neural handshake, Amy wipes the blood from her nose and lets herself lean on Nina for a moment while the rest of the K-scientists tiredly separate out the soil samples, and then she transfers herself to Kieren’s side and they go out. 

(She skips around a certain patch on the grating, saying, “woah, I can’t walk there,” and Kieren’s stomach heats with embarrassment.)

They expect Henry to be gone, but he isn’t.

He’s waiting for them on the tram platform, his blue eyes luminous in the dark. He stands under the graffiti where Simon had once tried to kiss Kieren, and Kieren still doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be. It’s three lumpy shapes clustered together. If it’s a kaiju, it’s a very poor one.

Henry spots them approaching, and steps back, boggling.

He hasn’t seen them in full drive suit before, armor plating included, and his eyes gobble them up, greedy and hungry. For a second, he reminds Kieren of Jem, who ate up every detail about jaeger pilots the way their dad’s mates followed every bit of football news. When you’re that age, you’re hungry for everything: for food, for attention, for your body to stop growing and maybe for that boy to touch you, but mostly for someone to tell you that you’re okay. It’s a horrible, gaping maw you carry around in your gut all the time.

“Oh, wow,” Henry says, wide-eyed. “You look like Rangers. Like, real Rangers.”

“That’s because we are,” Amy tells him stoutly.

She looks magnificent as she says it, and Kieren looks at her and, for the first time, actually _believes_ it. Amy Dyer is a Ranger, and that makes him, Kieren Walker, one too.

Then she adds, “you dumb dumb,” with affection, and everything is suddenly normal again.

 

*

 

Kieren’s heard stories about canaries in coal mines, centuries ago, before there was even simple scientific gas detection -- the sound, and then the absence of sound that is very much its own sound that comes out of the canary no longer singing would be enough to send the miners evacuating, posthaste.

It steals across the common room, that absence, until there’s nothing left of the usual chatter but Henry saying with great enthusiasm “-- it was _so majestic --“_ and suddenly, not even that: the rest of his sentence cuts into a startled nothing like it had been beheaded.

The hairs on the back of Kieren’s neck are already rising even before he looks up.

The foreman’s standing over their table.

His face is hard to look at; his features all seem to emerge from his skull in the same bulbous way, like malignant growths, all of them damp, somehow; the fungus of his running nose, his sweating chin.

Kieren sits up, and Simon’s arm falls from around the back of his chair.

The foreman waits for a moment before he speaks. “Walker, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

He hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his carhart and looks around. His gaze lingers on the door, like he’s waiting for somebody else to come through it. Kieren stares at him and tries to remember if he’s _ever_ seen the foreman come into the garrison. Usually it’s just his minions who do the dirty work of dealing with the labourers directly.

“Was hopin’ I’d catch you and the girlfriend,” the foreman admits, and his eyes drop down on them from their lofty height, lingering in a deliberate way at the minimal space between Kieren and Simon’s chairs.

Kieren glances at Simon, who wears the perfectly serene expression of someone starting to get very angry, and back at the foreman.

“Amy?”

“Oh. That ‘er name?”

The tone is dismissive, careless, and everyone at the table sucks in a sharp breath all at once; the insult had hit home. Kieren imagines he can hear their teeth grinding together, and takes a moment to be deeply grateful Zoe isn’t here: she’s on the other side of the garrison, driving the inmates to tears at dodgeball.

The foreman didn’t get to where he is by being a dumb American hick -- he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Kieren breathes in, steadies himself, and sets his jaw in the most intimidating expression he knows. Which, granted, isn’t particularly intimidating but at the very least looks impatient.

“She’s around,” he says coolly. Mara Anwonsewu had been helping her obtain some equipment.

“Well, never mind then,” the foreman waves it off, and then crooks his finger at him. “You, come with me.”

He turns and strides back across the common room, followed by a hundred sets of luminescent blue eyes.

Slowly, Kieren stands. Simon’s hand leverages under his elbow, helping him up, and there’s a question in the grip of his fingers. Kieren puts his own hand on Simon’s shoulder as he squeezes out from around the table, and presses down. _Stay,_ he means, and Simon’s eyes blaze. He nods.

The foreman’s half-way down the corridor, and it forces Kieren to jog to catch up.

He’s never bothered to learn the man’s name, but why would he?

He’s everybody Kieren has ever hated -- Bill Macy and the churlish scientists at Norfolk and the supervisor who kicked Freddie Preston to his death and brushed his coat off afterward and Newt Geiszler when he was trying his hardest to be funny, which of course was when he was also at his most damaging. He doesn’t need a name.

They walk in silence through the garrison. The foreman’s expression is thoughtful, his gait idle. The labourers passing in either direction send them sidelong looks, and Kieren wants to shake his hands at them and deny it. _No, no, I didn’t have a choice about this._

Again, probably on purpose.

Oh, god, Kieren hates him.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how it’s the most actively prejudiced who somehow wind up in charge? 

The foreman’s bigotry is different from Oliver’s. Oliver, at least, comes from a place of stupidity; he blindly repeats his shallow understanding of what the blues entail, thinking it has to be fact because society says so. He’s here to study them so he can _make_ those things fact. (It does not, Kieren thinks, make him a very good scientist.) But the foreman’s is another kind, one that thrives right underneath that shallowness and takes advantage of it.

He breaks the silence suddenly.

“I heard you were at Norfolk for a time?”

“I was,” Kieren says shortly.

“Hmm,” the foreman hums noncommittally in the back of his throat. “You must have been one of the very first to ever rot. How were you contaminated?”

“I don’t know.” Kieren tells a lie, and then he tells a truth. “It’s rainy where I live.”

Rick Macy is nobody’s business but his.

“Hmm,” the foreman hums again. “Shame. Tell me, Walker,” he visibly changes the subject. “What do you know about the justice system in these parts?”

_I know how unfair it is,_ Kieren thinks, kneejerk from years of talking to people like Mahmoud. _The justice system is paid to feed prisons. Prisons are a business. They’re a business that thrives on punishing poverty for existing, and lets the wealthy give themselves value because they’ll never see the inside of one. The act of filling prisons is systematic. It’s self-fulfilling._

Out loud, he says, “Not much.”

They walk, and the foreman talks. He starts in about the Wall of Life project -- how _honorable_ it had all been in the beginning, with all these people from all walks of life coming together to beat the bounds and protect their coasts. It changed when the Kaiju War ended. ( _It changed when Muttavore slammed through the Wall in Sydney like it was nothing,_ Kieren thinks, but knows better than to say.) And now the conditions that had once been considered noble to bear were now _inhumane._

People don’t like thinking about what goes on in prisons, he tells Kieren. They’re all right with a little messiness, because prisoners should have thought of that before going to prison, but the bleeding hearts will get on them if they hear that they’ve got people working on the Wall this close to the Arctic circle. Especially when Zombie labour is available.

“It’s important,” he says. “That your lot understand that the work you do is vital. It’s important, and the world is grateful that you’re so capable for the tasks we need you to do.”

Kieren, who senses a “but” coming, waits.

“But we can’t have Zombies thinking they don’t gotta do the work. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“Amy and I upset the status quo,” Kieren finishes, and resists the urge to add a sarcastic _sorry._

“You’re messing with the natural order, is all,” the foreman agrees. “You weren’t supposed to be able to drift. I let you try it as a curiosity. I thought it would entertain my crew. And I let you keep it up, thinking that at any moment, you’d fail and I’d get to use pilots more suited for the task. And now here we are.”

He stops walking.

Kieren, instinctive, looks up. They’re at a junction, and the wall beside them is emblazoned with the albatross symbol of the PPDC.

Except someone’d tried to graffiti over it. The albatross is obscured with the same blobby shape that’s on the platform, that Simon has over his bunk. It’s the shape Kieren wants to say is a kaiju, but it can’t be. It’s too deliberately shaped to be some amateurish representation of a kaiju face.

“Do you want to know what the world is very good at?” the foreman asks, quiet.

“What is that, sir?”

“Beating the _shit_ out of kaiju. We _excel_ at it. We created our monsters to protect. We created monsters to guard and do good. We fought the monsters that were at our door. They wanted to destroy us, and we won, Mr Walker. We _won.”_

He looks over, and Kieren -- still looking at the wall -- works his throat.

What is he supposed to say to this? When the news came in about K-Day, they’d been on their way out the door -- it was January, his sister was turning ten, and Mr Nguyen always gave free ice cream to tykes on their birthday. He’d had no idea, then, what was going to happen to him. How was he supposed to know that someday, victory over the kaiju would no longer include him?

“So you see,” the foreman says. “We saved the world, and there’s no place for you in it. There’s no place for you except the places we make, and those of you that don’t fit into those places get tossed off the Wall. Got it?”

_Yeah,_ Kieren wants to say, but before the word can escape his throat, it gets hooked. He swallows, but it’s stuck fast.

He thinks of Amy saying, _you still think like you’re one of them, don’t you?_

He thinks of himself, realizing, _They’re never going to cure us._

He opens his mouth.

He says, “Haley.”

The foreman’s fleshy brows hunker together. “Hm?” comes froggily out of his throat.

“Freddie Preston’s wife. His widow. Pretty sure his _place_ was with her, but he got tossed off the Wall, remember? Her name,” Kieren finally peels his eyes away from the graffitied-over symbol on the wall. “Is Haley.”

 

*

 

In his distraction, Kieren doesn’t stop to consider his entrance when he keys himself into his and Amy’s bunk.

The yelp and furious scuffling, however, bring him right back to it, and he jerks his head up, saying quickly, “It’s just me!” as he gets the door shut behind him. The slice of light from the hallway vanishes with a snap.

Nina peeks out from underneath the coat that Amy had instinctively flung over her face. When she sees it’s him, she pulls the coat all the way off with as much dignity as she can, like wearing a labourer’s coat over her head is all par for the course. She smoothes her hair down.

“Sorry, Nina,” he says apologetically.

“We weren’t expecting you!” complains a flustered Amy. The room is pitch dark, but it doesn’t matter to them. “We thought you’d be gone ’til shift change.”

“So did I.” And Kieren settles down next to them on the floor, crossing his legs. He tells them about his encounter with the foreman. As he talks, Nina eases down so that her head’s in Amy’s lap, her mouth turned upward. From here, Kieren can see the polyps, swelling against her teeth: no wonder she never opens her mouth much when she talks.

Amy has an array of tools lined up on her other side, smuggled to her via Mara, who has access to things Zombies didn’t need and thus can’t have; safety razors, clippers, a crude nail file that had been shoved to the end of the line, hatefully ignored. She mutters to herself as she works.

Filing polyps is supposed to callous them. It’s messy and painful, but calloused polyps don’t burst. Burst polyps are what makes you go feral.

Suddenly, Nina flinches and swings her head around, spitting onto the fabric lying by her head. It stains, toxic blue and fresh.

Kieren frowns. “Is that my shirt?”

“Shut up, it was bound for rags for Zoe’s dress anyway,” Amy says, and, quieter, “Sorry, Nina.”

“It’s fine.” Trustingly, she puts her head back in Amy’s lap, and while Amy contemplates her choices, she asks, “So the foreman threatened to … what, toss you off the Wall if you don’t behave?”

“Yeah, he’s a dick,” says Kieren distractedly. The sky is blue, Alaska is cold as bollocks, and the foreman is a dick. “Are you trying to find what’s the least painful?”

“It would be better if I had proper equipment,” Amy mutters. “Blast.”

“I don’t care about that,” Nina answers, though the grey, pinched look on her face says she cares very much. “I just need it to not look … like I’ve had my mouth filed down. I need to be able to cover it up. Previously, I’d had to take emergency leave ’til my mouth healed, but it’d be suspicious here and now, at this critical stage. Besides,” she adds ruefully, “I’ve run out of fictional grandmothers who can suddenly pass away.”

“Critical stage?” Kieren echoes. “What critical stage?”

Nina dodges the question.

“I want to hear about the foreman,” she says firmly. Since Kieren isn’t used to “firm” and “Nina” in the same context, he shuts his mouth. “Is he threatening to take you out of Blue’s cockpit?”

“I don’t think he actually cares that much about us, specifically,” he tells her. “I mean, it felt pretty personal to get singled out like that, but … He doesn’t care what we do, so long as you guys don’t try to do it, too.”

In an undertone, Amy murmurs, “Here, let’s try this,” and Nina tips her head back.

Kieren continues, “He doesn’t like that Amy and I are Blue’s pilots, but it’s useful to him. If someone comes up to him all full of bluster, like, ‘oh, those Zombies are saying they’re oppressed, is that true?’ he can say, ‘of course it isn’t. Look at the rig I run, we’ve even got Zombies who are pilots,’ like having two pilots completely negates the however-many hundreds of Zombies we have here who _aren’t_ pilots and are, in fact, oppressed.”

They pick it apart: the foreman wants recognition and that’s why he’s letting their shady benefactor use his rig as a base of operations, but he also wants that monopoly, and he doesn’t want to give up the invaluable source of free labour he has.

When they’re done, they help Nina up and let her inspect herself in the mirror.

Her mouth is cement-grey, and when she bares her teeth, her gums are haloed a poisonous blue. She’s going to have to be really shy about smiling for a few days, but she doesn’t have the wrecked, smeared look the rest of them always do after the medics get their hands on them. 

“Thanks,” she mumbles, not moving her lips much, and Amy bumps their shoulders together, knocking her into Kieren, who passes her back with a nudge. She smiles down at the ugly square toes of her shoes, shy.

Kieren glances again at her reflection, and runs his tongue over the polyps inside his cheeks. They’re not quite full-grown, but they’re big enough to burst if he gets them the wrong way. It doesn’t matter -- he’s due to have his mouth filed soon.

“See? If Zombies could take care of Zombies, it’d be a lot better for everyone,” Amy says.

 

*

 

The on-rig medic frowns, all of her facial features hunkering down into a huddle towards the center of her face.

Then she wheels her stool backwards, holding the bottle up to the light to read the label clearly.

“According to this,” she tells him, disapproval radiating off of her like heat, like it’s something she painstakingly keeps bubbling on the hob. “You were supposed to come by for a refill eight days ago.”

Kieren blinks. “Was I?”

She lowers the bottle and fixes him with a piercing look.

She’s about Simon’s age, and though not technically a supervisor, she’s another one of those administrative personnel whose name Kieren’s never bothered to learn, purely out of spite. She has the same permanently embittered attitude that a lot of her generation does; the young professionals who became adults during the Jaeger era, who built their education, lives, and careers around the Rising only to have the breach abruptly sealed, the Kaiju War over, and their skill set suddenly obsolete.

Wherever she imagined herself, it wasn’t here in the middle of the Bering Sea, treating frostbite and headcolds in prisoners and dispensing anti-kaiju meds to the half-rotted and inhuman labourers everyone calls Zombies.

“Have you been taking your meds, Walker?” she demands.

“Of course I have,” Kieren responds blankly.

“Then what would account for eight missed doses?”

The accusation in her voice stings, because Kieren hasn’t -- he _hasn’t --_

“-- I have _never_ missed a dose,” he says, firmly. “Never. I wouldn’t do that.”

She makes a low noise of disbelief. He looks at her face, keenly aware that she thinks he’s lying. Fear chills all the way through him, icing over inside his gut, and he has a sudden vision of himself hauled up in front of a panel of administrators -- the toady foreman, Phil, all the supervisors who love having all their prejudices confirmed -- and being accused of trying to go feral. What could he possibly say in protest that they would believe? They would have already made up their minds.

_Good Lord, what a monster._

But Kieren hasn’t missed a dose. It’s a sense memory: pill in hand, hand to mouth, wash it down with water if necessary (though not much, of course, Zombies aren’t as spongy as humans tend to be.) Every morning -- no, every evening, Kieren takes his before bed, of course he does -- every --

He goes completely still.

Amy takes her meds in the morning. The sense memory is hers, made his in the drift.

Oh, Jesus.

The medic is front of him. “Open,” she says, a small mirrored instrument in her hand.

Kieren tips his head back and lets her pull his lips and cheeks away from his gums so that she can inspect the polyps growing there.

“When are you due for a filing?” she asks brusquely.

“Wednesday,” he answers.

She makes another noise. “It’ll have to wait until then, I’m full up. I had you lot on a schedule until that dumb Watson girl happened and they told me to work you double-time. What do they expect from me?” She turns away from him, muttering. “Sit tight, Walker, I’m getting you your next dose.”

He leaves with a new bottle and a rocky, iced-over feeling in his gut.

As he shuts the hatch to the med bay behind him, he almost walks directly into Mahmoud.

“Woah, there, tea-time.” He puts out a hand to steady him.

“Hey,” says Kieren in surprise, looking up, and starts to ask, “what are you doing here?” before he spots the blonde head right behind him.

“Oh, no,” blurts out of him instead. “Oh, god, what did she do? Are you badly hurt?”

Zoe circles to Mahmoud’s other side so as to better roll her eyes at him, flicking at Kieren’s forehead with her fingernail as she goes by. It doesn’t, of course, do anything, and Kieren continues to hold Mahmoud at arm’s length, looking him over with exaggerated concern. 

Okay, mostly exaggerated. Okay, he might genuinely be worried.

“Nah, man,” Mahmoud reassures him, patting him on the shoulder a few times. “I’m fine. Just wanted to see the nurse ‘bout some vitamin C tablets, fight them sniffles.”

That sounds like a luxury. “How many ration points are they?”

“Seventy-five.” Kieren’s eyebrows hike up, and Mahmoud flashes his very white teeth. “I’ve been saving.”

“No kidding. You rotate home soon, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he answers, and doesn’t say anything more.

This is what Kieren knows about Mahmoud: he likes thick-cut chips, American football, and the satisfaction of calling anyone with an English accent “tea-time.” He dislikes mold in the showers, the supervisors, and the penal system. He always pulls his weight. But the thing he loves most in this world is his hometown, and the people waiting for him there. He talks about Montana the same way Kieren talks about art, or the city-cemeteries, the same worshipful way Simon talks about Zombies. Listening to him makes Kieren feel like it’s okay to be homesick, even for the awful parts.

Never, in all the time Kieren’s known him, has he answered with such a casual “yeah.”

“Hey, Walker,” says Zoe from behind him, while he’s still on a double-take. “Walk with us a bit.”

Since they more or less have him sandwiched and there isn’t anywhere else to go, Kieren says, “Sure,” and, “your vitamin C?” to Mahmoud when he turns away from the med bay.

“I’ll come back,” Mahmoud says peaceably.

Kieren watches them sidelong, the meds rattling inside their bottle and the feeling in his stomach steadily thawing. Mahmoud’s in dress-down greys, but Zoe must have just recently come off shift, because her hair’s wet with melted ice fall, slicked down in ratty clumps close to her skull. She’s got a bandana tied around her neck, the front of it heavily stained.

This is what Kieren knows about Zoe: she likes winning, having the last word, and her community. She used to be clergy before she became a Buenakai, and since becoming a labourer she misses the voices of small children the most. When something goes wrong, she will _always_ be the first one on the scene, and she’s going to get married in a dress made from the clothes of all the people who’ve worked beside her.

There’s no government that will legally recognize a Zombie marriage. They can still have a ceremony, but if the administrators decide to split her and her spouse come rotation time, there won’t be any recourse. Conjugal visits don’t exist for them. She’s been lucky enough already, he thinks, that she’s managed to stick with her cousin this far.

But if there’s one thing he can say about Zoe Kelly with confidence, it’s that she’s going to do it anyway.

He shakes his head, still boggled by it. 

Zoe, a kaiju-eyed bride.

“You’re full of shit, tea-time,” says Mahmoud in response to whatever it is she’s telling him.

“Children,” Kieren admonishes, tuning back into the conversation. “Don’t make me pull this rig over.”

Zoe bares her teeth at him, her blotchy bandana pulled nearly level with her bottom lip.

“You know, it’s funny,” she says, half-turning towards him as they walk. “I’ve asked almost everybody else, but I don’t think I ever asked you. Did your family turn you in for the reward, Kieren?”

He remembers how, several weeks ago, Mahmoud told him about dodgeball, how if Kieren wasn’t going to respect the great American behemoth that was football, then at the very least he could respect dodgeball. This feels a lot like that: Zoe’s voice is made of foam, light and almost friendly, and then it slams into his face with tremendous force.

_Foul,_ he thinks.

“No,” he says quietly. “They didn’t.”

“Weren’t they loyal to the PPDC?”

And even after everything, Kieren still bristles.

“Of course they were,” he says, affronted. “As much as anybody. They could have used the money, too, but they didn’t. I suppose,” they step up against the wall to make room for a supervisor bustling heedlessly in the other direction. “You could say that their loyalty was still individualistic and not Pan-Pacific and that made them a problem, but you don’t know my parents. They’ve never been a threat to anybody.”

“Did they teach you to keep your head down and follow all the rules?”

Again, a direct hit, meant to make him trip.

He puffs up, because so what. Kieren and Rick Macy were exposed to the Kaiju Blue and the next day, Rick vanished, and his father told everyone he’d gone off to Preston to join the PPDC, that _ye gotta keep yer eyes peeled, Sue, Steve, those monsters’ll be coming back any day and ye gotta be prepared._

He opens his mouth to tell her exactly that -- “my best friend died and it might as well have killed me too, my family did what they thought was best” -- but Mahmoud nudges her in the ribs, and to Kieren’s immense surprise, she almost … softens.

“You thought you’d be allowed to go home,” she finishes, and this time, there’s real compassion in her voice.

The wind goes out of him.

“I’d hoped,” he allows. “Amy’s done a good job of convincing me that’s never going to happen.”

“She’s smart,” Zoe says simply.

“Yeah,” Kieren agrees. Drifting with him had given Amy solid ground, and drifting with her made him aware. It’s an awareness that sits in him now, as aching and unsightly as a flayed-open spine, stuck with staples, but he wouldn’t take it back. He wouldn’t change it for anything. Everything good that’s happened to him recently has happened because Amy Dyer looked at him and took a chance.

_Don’t be dumb,_ he can practically hear her say. _The deeper the bond, the stronger the drift. I felt it in the City of Flowers, didn’t you?_

They walk on in silence. He doesn’t know where they’re going. They don’t really seem to be leading him anywhere except around -- Mahmoud bumps shoulders with him occasionally to get him to change directions, but that’s it.

Kieren hears himself say, “I have a little sister,” and it’s the first time he’s said her name out loud in three years. “Jem.”

They both look at him, their eyebrows hiked.

“I didn’t know that,” Mahmoud murmurs.

Kieren swallows, and swallows again, but there’s an arid patch in his throat that won’t go away.

“I wasn’t,” he says roughly. “Going to do anything to jeopardize seeing her again. That’s all. It’s the same way you feel about Montana, man.”

He nods at Mahmoud, who nods back, saying, “I respect that. Y’should come for a visit sometime, see the mountains, meet my folks.”

“I dunno, I think I’ve been in America long enough. Aren’t we technically on American waters? I’m not sure how much more there is to see,” he spreads his arms, inviting them to take in the grey hallways, the cheap lino floors and the wet marks that’ve been tracked in with their boots. They pass the prison lending library just in time to hear a truly impressive belch emanate from its depths, and Kieren’s gesture broadens. “Your country is amazing.”

“ _Shut_ up, tea-time,” says Mahmoud grievously, while Zoe hangs onto his other side, laughing.

“It isn’t so easy, anymore,” Kieren continues, still in that light tone. “If they cut me loose and told me to go home tomorrow, I couldn’t.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“I’m not leaving Amy anywhere. Where we go, we go together. That’s non-negotiable.”

They round another corner.

Passing under the graffiti that obscures the PPDC emblem, Mahmoud and Zoe slow, and Kieren continues for another pace or two before adjusting his stride, turning back to them.

“We’d find a way to bring Frankie and Henry with us when we went,” he says distractedly. “I’m not leaving kids here. Simon would have to come, too, and _not --“_ he sticks his finger in Zoe’s face, because she’s smirking at him in a preemptive kind of way. “Because I’m -- oh, what’s the phrase you use, Mahmoud -- I’d want him to come with us, and not just because I’m riding his dick.”

Mahmoud’s mouth forms an amazed ‘o’ and his eyebrows leap up in a fantastic feat of acrobatics. He lifts one fist to his mouth, and the other reaches out to hit Zoe’s shoulder -- one, two, three times.

“I heard him,” Zoe assures him.

“ _Ho_ brah,” bursts out of Mahmoud with delight. “Say that again. Please, please, say that again.” He hoots loudly, saying “ _damn,_ tea time,” in an admiring way, and Kieren and Zoe watch him, fond.

“And Simon wouldn’t leave without you lot,” Kieren finishes the train of thought once Mahmoud has recovered. “So that’s it. I’m here. I wouldn’t be going anywhere even if I could.”

Their gazes rest on him, strangely heavy, so Kieren turns away, turning his bottle of anti-kaiju meds over in his hands, listening to the rattle of the pills settling around inside. Next he looks, Mahmoud and Zoe stand shoulder-to-shoulder, closer than he’s ever seen them, having a wordless conversation. Zoe’s shrugs aren’t nearly as communicative as Brian’s, but they’re close. Her eyes blink, blue-lit, and Mahmoud’s mouth softens.

As one, they look at him.

“Kieren,” says Zoe. “Listen.”

“There’s going to be a riot,” says Mahmoud.

Kieren blinks.

His eyes move from the grave expressions on their faces to their shoulders, lined up against each other’s, and down.

They’re holding hands.

_Oh,_ he thinks, and closes his eyes.

When did that happen?

When --

Pressure on his shoulder. A hand squeezes it, and Kieren slits his eyes open to see Mahmoud regarding him steadily, calmly, and with all of the kindness that Kieren admires him for.

“We’d like your blessing,” he says, too softly to be heard by anybody else in the world except for them. “Yours and Amy’s.”

“You’re important,” Zoe adds. “To us, we mean.”

In the drift, he remembers hearing Simon tell her, _they’re your friends, too, or did you forget that?_

“Blessing for your wedding?” Kieren asks, knowing he wouldn’t need to ask Amy for anything. She’d give them her support whole-heartedly and without question. She and Brian are making Zoe’s dress, aren’t they? 

Do you think that counts as something old?

Or something new?

“Or a blessing for -- you’re going to riot?”

“We’re going to take the rig. We’re the ones who work it, we’re the ones who should control it. Things around here have gotta change, so we’re gonna change it. If we can’t do it here, in the armpit of the PPDC, then we can’t do it anywhere.”

Those are Zoe’s words, fitting easily into Mahmoud’s mouth, where his white teeth bite them off into sharp, neat sections.

“You’re going to overthrow the administrators?”

“Yes,” they say in unison.

They announce it confidently, and without a trace of doubt. Kieren looks back and forth between them, and knows with certainty that they have a plan, and they’ve had it for awhile.

He focuses on Mahmoud. “I thought you wanted to go home,” he says, voice scraping out of him. “Your -- man, your sentence is almost up, you go on parole with the next rotation. I thought you weren’t going to risk that.”

Mahmoud’s mouth pulls, and just like that, Kieren doesn’t need him to explain it.

The same way Kieren carefully, so very carefully folded up his dream of seeing Jem’s face, of hearing her say, _Wake up, Ranger!_ like they’re kids again, and put it aside because of Amy and Frankie and Henry and Simon -- it’s the same for Mahmoud. He loves Zoe more than he loves the dream of going home.

“What’s the point,” he says. “When I’m just gonna to know that you guys never can, and there ain’t nobody doing a thing to change it?”

He holds up his and Zoe’s joined hands, their interlocked fingers, Mahmoud’s brown and Zoe’s grey.

“If this,” he gives them a shake. “If this ain’t worth stickin’ my neck out for -- what is?”

Kieren’s chest aches like he’s been cratered, like something the size of Blue’s fist has punched a hole in him and it’s filling with seawater, swampy and wet and heavy. He’s having trouble breathing around it.

“Is everybody in on this?”

“Not everybody,” Zoe says. “Not too many of the inmates, but enough,” she smiles sidelong at her husband-to-be. “And not all of our people, either.” People like Min Seong, who have kids on the outside, and like Chuckles, who’s never been moved for much of anything.

A loud bang and the sound of raised voices from the next corridor make them draw up together, pressing up against the wall. An inmate dashes by at a flat run and Zoe ducks her chin down, the bandana around her neck partially obscuring her mouth. Kieren looks at it and then goes completely still.

“Zoe,” he says, in a tone of voice he can’t identify. “Let me see that.”

She opens her mouth to retort, and then must catch a glimpse of the expression on his face, because her teeth click shut and her throat bobs, and without a word, she unties the bandana and holds it out to him.

He spreads it out. 

The fabric is grey, and what he thought were grease stains marking the center of it are, in fact, a symbol.

The same symbol, actually, that Kieren’s been seeing everywhere for weeks: the three blotchy shapes that’s been on signs, in corridors, on the backs of people’s hands and above Simon’s bunk. It’s the same shape that’s on the wall behind them, the one the foreman had looked at with such derision.

And now, for the first time, Kieren sees that it’s Blue.

It’s Blue’s lumpy body and Blue’s strong arms, lifted and flexed above its head like it’s going to smash something. Redeemer Blue. His and Amy’s Blue.

All this time, they’ve been painting his jaeger all over the Aleutian rig.

There are words, too, he noticed, handwritten on Zoe’s bandana, climbing around the circle of Blue’s mammoth arms. 

_We take your fear,_ he reads. _And we force it to surrender._

“Where did you get this?” he hears himself ask, as distant as if from the top of the Wall.

“We all carry it,” Zoe answers, and he looks up into her eyes -- her blue, luminescent, kaiju-colored eyes. “In one way or another. Those of us who are in on the coup. It’s our sign.”

Something borrowed, he thinks.

Something blue.

“Excuse me,” he says politely. “There’s somebody I need to talk to.”

 

*

 

There’s a feeling to empty churches that’s entirely different from churches that are full of people, no matter if it’s a soaring cathedral made of bones or the converted barn from Kieren’s hometown or the on-rig Buenakai church with the stained glass windows drawn on graphing paper. Something about the definition of a church changes if there isn’t anybody in it.

Onibaba and Knifehead, Otachi and Leatherback all watch from their panels as Kieren stalks through the center of the room -- the folding chairs are stacked on their carts, the hymnals tucked away in their boxes out of sight, and Simon’s at the front of the room, frowning over his notecards. Like Zoe, he must have just gotten off shift -- he’s still in his coat, his face covered in a fine coating of cement dust from the Wall.

He jumps when Kieren calls, “What’s going to happen at the riot?”

“Uhh,” Simon responds blankly.

Kieren comes to a halt in front of him. “What are you planning?”

Simon goes on the defensive. 

“I,” he says with an edge to his voice. “Am not planning anything. Where’s Amy?”

“Making her own interrogations. We’ll exchange notes later. I wanted to go to the source.”

He leans in as he speaks, and Simon leans back automatically, his arms folding across his chest in a protective manner. He’s quickly regaining his footing, a frown pinching his features together.

“What makes you assume I’m the source?”

Kieren gestures at their surroundings. With the folding chairs stacked away, there’s no aisle, but you can tell where it usually is by the path scuffed into the floor. “Being in the middle of things is your job.”

Simon’s eyebrows climb, disdainful, like they’re stepping out of the way of something unpleasant. It’s been awhile since Kieren’s looked at him and thought of the slimy salesman, but he’s in full force now.

“Is it really?”

“Yeah. You know,” Kieren breaks eye contact at last, looking first at the ceiling and then at the ground, like maybe his thoughts are scattered down there and he can pick them up again. Then he looks to the blue of Simon’s collar and says, irked, “You’re a priest. Your job is to -- to _know._ To -- I don’t know, to _lead.”_

He always had something new to tell them in a world where information was scarce and carefully rationed out by people like the foreman, who wanted them controlled, so it makes sense that he’d be at the center of this, too. 

Or maybe that’s just what Simon is to him: someone to orbit.

He sets his jaw, and rolls his next question around in his mouth until he feels it turn sharp.

“Who’s the man in the mask?” he fires. “The one who distorts his voice?” _He’s the same person who’s funding this entire expedition, except I don’t think you know that,_ he thinks. _And I don’t think the administrators know he’s got kaiju priests in his pocket. Our prophet and our shady benefactor are one and the same._

Simon doesn’t seem surprised. “I don’t know.”

“What does he want from you?”

“Numbers.”

“Numbers,” Kieren echoes. Simon isn’t lying -- he wouldn’t, not to Kieren, and not right now -- but Kieren hadn’t been expecting the truth to make no sense.

“Yeah.” He unfolds his arms, mindlessly running the edges of his notecards along the inside of his palm. He offers no further explanation, and Kieren watches him for a beat, his eyes narrowed.

“What are you doing?” he asks. It’s rhetorical -- he isn’t talking to Simon, not really. Simon just happens to be in the way.

“I am not _doing_ anything,” Simon’s voice is careful, precise. “I’m not leading anything. I asked not to be involved in the planning.”

Kieren’s eyes crack into his.

“Why.”

“Because I didn’t want the responsibility, should anything we attempt fail miserably or -- worse -- end with someone getting hurt.”

Again, it’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth, either, and even if Kieren didn’t have Amy’s memories of Simon and Zoe in the corridor, he would know that. He stares Simon down, unimpressed, because Simon Monroe is the type of person who would risk rebelling and failing than never rebelling at all.

And it’s Simon’s turn to dodge his eyes out of the way. 

“I,” he confesses. “I knew that where I would go, Amy and -- and you would follow. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want you to get involved.”

“It’s a little late for that,” Kieren says tightly.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

He’s still avoiding Kieren’s eyes, and Kieren waits.

When he speaks, his voice has lost all its loftiness, its precision. It’s a low scrape.

“Kieren,” he says. “You know it’s in Amy’s nature -- it’s who she is. If she knows how … how much the others look up to her, she’ll want to be there. You know she will, and that’s why I don’t want her to know what the others are planning. If you care about her, you’ll keep her out of it --“

“Don’t,” Kieren cuts in. “Don’t you _dare.”_

Simon has the decency to drop his eyes.

“Don’t you do that. Don’t take how you want to _keep_ us, don’t take your love for _me --“_ Simon jolts. “And make it about protecting _her,_ all right? She can make her own decisions, and she’ll want to know.” He frowns, because Simon’s now staring a hole in the wall. “ _What.”_

His eyes dart at him and quickly away again, and a moment later it dawns on Kieren that he’s embarrassed.

He unravels the conversation backward, and then makes a very rude noise.

It works: Simon looks at him again, affronted.

Kieren doesn’t have the patience to be coy. It’s the first time he’s used the word “love,” but so what. Simon loves him.

_Everybody_ knows that Simon loves him. Kieren knows, Amy knows, Henry and Zoe and Phil Wilson all know, probably the ice in the sea and the long-dead kaiju know it too.

“Simon,” says Kieren Walker to the priest. “What’s going to happen.”

“Tomorrow,” Simon responds. “There will be a diversion. The foreman and the supervisors -- they don’t know it’s coming, and while they’re occupied, we’ll take the command center. We’ll take the hub and we’ll take the ready room. We outnumber them five to one.”

“What’s the diversion?”

Simon looks at him.

“Fine,” says Kieren, and asks instead, “How are you planning on taking their building? None of you even have access to it -- your ID chips will all be denied. Even if you did, you don’t know the layout.”

“I do,” says Simon simply. “I’ve been inside.”

There’s a pause.

It happens almost soundlessly; Simon’s words hang in the air, and in the next beat, they turn to glass and cut straight through Kieren, through veins and sinew, and they slice his heart to ribbons.

He recoils.

He steps back, and then steps back again. It puts him in the line of sight of the kaiju on the wall, and he stands there and fights with the peculiar sensation like his stomach’s filling with blood, something wet and terrible happening to his insides, and the kaiju can see it all.

Simon stares at him, baffled, and then, as Kieren opens his mouth, it clicks.

“ _No!”_ bursts out of him, his eyes widening, horrified. “No, Kieren, no, I swear -- that’s not why I -- what happened in the ready room, I didn’t plan that, it wasn’t --“

“Stop talking,” comes out of Kieren harshly, sounding exactly like the drag of a brutal murder, and Simon’s jaw clicks shut.

Scraping his hands over his head, Kieren heaves in a breath and steadies himself with the same amount of effort he’d use to steady Blue in a pitching sea. He paces a circle, fingers lacing behind his skull, and lets the breath out.

He turns back to Simon.

For a beat, they just look at each other, and Kieren can’t help but marvel at the difference between this Simon and the Simon Amy had introduced him to back in December -- when they first met, Simon just someone who was calm and cold and bright, moonlight to Amy’s unflagging sunshine, an adherent of a religion Kieren didn’t have much patience for. Now he’s here, mouth parted and near-panting with distress, his eyes fixed on Kieren without blinking the same way, he imagines, people used to watch the breach for movement.

_I did that,_ he thinks.

Kieren Walker, who has tried for so long to make himself so very small and tread lightly, so that he doesn’t leave footprints in other people’s hearts and so they’ll never hurt for missing him, and he made Simon like this.

He steps back into Simon’s space, and he has no defenses for how Simon’s shoulders and eyes and entire body turn towards him, responding to the smallest movement. He is poised, ready.

Kieren takes a deep breath.

“ _If,”_ he stresses. “Amy and I were to get involved, what would our part entail?”

“We’ll need your help to protect us,” Simon says immediately, watching him without blinking. “We can take the rig, I have no doubt of that, but if the PPDC brings soldiers, we won’t be able to hold it, and they won’t be gentle -- the Aleutian rig is not an important asset to them. They’ll take their people and do away with the rest of us. You and Amy are the only ones of us they’ll care about.”

“When you put it like that, it sounds like you’d rather we be hostages.”

“Ambassadors,” he corrects. “The PPDC won’t negotiate with kaiju creatures if they know that the rig is controlled half by Zombies and half by inmates, but they will,” he turns his eyes on Kieren. “Negotiate with the pilots of the world’s only existing jaeger.”

“Negotiate how?” He thinks about it. “Negotiate for what.”

He knows, though: the Aleutian people want a choice in work conditions, re-citizenship, the right to _keep_ their belongings and communicate with their families, and the inmates want health care, manageable hours, and the chance to work their paroles closer to home. Things Kieren thought they’d eventually earn; little freedoms and justices that would be carefully parceled out to them.

But Amy’s been in his head for too long, and she thinks that people who wait for other people to _give_ them freedom are going to be waiting a long time.

“There’s a manifesto, if you’d like to see it,” Simon offers.

“Yeah, we would,” although he’s pretty sure they’ve seen it come together, in bits and pieces in the common room and the rec room, disguised as foosball matches or bouts of dodgeball. “Where would we need to be tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “The diversion will happen while you’re on your dive.”

“Right,” Kieren says, and heaves a sigh. “Right, yeah.”

A shadow falls over him, and he looks up just as Simon steps right into his space. His eyes drop to Kieren’s mouth, and Kieren -- who has more practice now -- interprets his intention just as he leans in. 

He steps smartly out of range.

“What. Yeah, don’t do that,” he says angrily.

“I --“ starts Simon.

“ _No.”_

Simon looks back at him, and then -- to Kieren’s complete surprise this time -- he drops his eyes.

He drops everything; his shoulders slump and his mouth turns down, and when he speaks, his voice is bent, defeated.

“Tell me what you want,” comes out of him, and Kieren looks at him, all at once feeling like a Buenakai scene etched and framed in stained glass; a kaiju creature, fierce and terrible, the priest supplicant before it. Simon shakes his head, rueful, and repeats, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

_I want,_ Kieren thinks immediately, _nobody to risk anything. I want everybody to stand down. Don’t rock the boat._

But that’s not right, is it?

_I don’t want anyone to die. I don’t want anyone to come to harm. I don’t want to attend any funerals._

That was it. Kieren Walker never wanted to look behind him and see a city-cemetery where there’d once been friends, and what else could possibly come out of a coup? They’re property of the PPDC. They’re disposable. They have a _place_ and those that don’t fit the _place_ get thrown off the Wall.

_They’ll work you to death if you do nothing,_ whispers a voice in Kieren’s mind. It could be anybody’s: Jem’s, Rick’s, Delilah’s. _Everyone’s a funeral you just don’t know yet._

So you might as well live.

He rests his weight back down on his heels and extends his hands.

Without hesitation, Simon reaches back. Their fingers lace, creating cathedrals.

“I want,” he says lowly. “You to kiss me --“

Again, it’s immediate: Simon leaning for him like water going downhill. Kieren forestalls him. “Two days from now. Got it?”

They pause and look at each other, as close together as anything, and so he sees the exact moment Simon understands what he’s saying. The only way Simon Monroe’s going to get another kiss from Kieren Walker is if he comes through without harm. He needs to not get himself martyred.

“Yeah,” he agrees, hoarse. “Yeah, okay.”

This time, when he tilts towards him, Kieren tips his chin up. Their foreheads touch.

Like Mori and Beckett.

Simon’s bunk room still has all eight of its occupants, faces that Kieren recognizes on sight if not by name all crowding in on each other. He looks up and around, and they look back. Strangely, all of them are off-shift -- none of them have to ask who he is, and it’s a testament, he thinks, to who they are that not a single one of them make a rude comment about why he’s here, even when he and Simon make it easy for them; Kieren shedding his coat, Simon pulling off his boots, how they keep touching each other in the way of people wanting to occupy the same small space.

He sits down on the edge of Simon’s mattress and looks again.

In the bunk across, a man he remembers telling them during the last meeting here that he contracted the blues by eating bad fish on an airplane flight looks back at him, and then pulls his collar down, revealing Blue in ballpoint ink on his collarbone. His three-fingered bunkmate above pulls the library punch card from the back of his book and flips it over, showing Kieren Blue’s silhouette there. One-by-one, the others reveal variations of the same; seven Blues look back at him in solidarity.

The eighth is at his back.

He thinks of Mahmoud saying, _if this ain’t worth the risk, what is._

He thinks of Amy saying, _they’re not going to do it for us._

He looks at these people with Blue’s symbol on them, and his heart feels small, contracted with the weight of itself, like coal under pressure. He nods at them, not knowing what else to do, and turns around.

Simon, he finds, likes to sleep on the left side, too, and there are places around him where Kieren fits without effort, arms hooked around ribs and necks, legs tangled to make themselves fit. Around them, the shift changes over, people shuffling in and out, respectfully quiet.

“Remember,” Simon says right up against Kieren’s ear, almost too quietly to be heard. “Remember when they came for you?”

Kieren hasn’t told him a single thing about it had been like, being found and captured and turned in for the reward -- but he supposes he doesn’t have to. It’s probably the same for everyone.

“I don’t want that to happen to anybody else.”

“I know,” Kieren replies, and they sleep.

 

*

 

When they came for Kieren, they came right after dinner, and they came in a pack. 

He doesn’t remember what dinner was, so his memory recreates the typical fare: potatoes that his mum makes palatable with salt and pepper, a vitamin mash that Dad insists be called vegetables for no other reason than it usually comes in some shade of green, and Kieren’s too young to remember a time before rationing, so to him, it’s a good dinner. He says, “no thanks, not hungry,” to Mum, same as he has for months, and sits across from his baby sister and listens to her smart-aleck about her teachers, her mates. Her name is Jem and she was his co-pilot all through childhood and on this day, she is a month shy of her sixteenth birthday.

They eat, and they laugh (or maybe he just really wants to remember them laughing,) and then as Kieren’s clearing the dishes, the radio at Jem’s hip crackles, and fear cracks down onto the table like a shattering plate.

Everybody moves at once.

And it’s not that Kieren doesn’t know what the plan is, but he moves and the rest of his family moves faster, like it’s something they have to outrace. They drive Kieren up the stairs and thrust him under the clutter in Jem’s closet -- it’s the best hiding place in the whole house. The door shuts while he’s still finding his footing, locking him in a darkness that means nothing, and he listens to them knocking things over on the way out, trying to make the closet door as inaccessible as possible.

Then, as one, they go to head off the head hunters.

He settles, perching uncomfortably on top of Jem’s boots, shrouded by clothes she’d long outgrown, costumes and uniforms. He listens hard. When they come in, the whole house shakes with it; door rattling off its frame, loud, clomping footsteps that make the walls shiver like a cold wind come through, and the raucous laughter of lads out having a time. 

Buried, Kieren can’t make out any of the words, but he hears Jem up at the highest register, screeching and furious.

Feeling around him, he comes up with a stiletto that she had spent an impossible amount off her ration card procuring for a school dance. His stomach turns liquid with dread, pitching.

Too quickly, they come thudding up the stairs -- two of them -- wait, no, just one person, making enough noise for two, and Kieren grips the stiletto by the arch and hopes, hopes, _hopes_ that they will deem Jem’s room too difficult, and not investigate.

No luck.

Through the wall, he hears the door open, bumping, the low scrape of furniture moving, cursing. 

Tension tightens like wire strings between Kieren’s shoulder blades. He makes a last-second decision, and when the closet door is yanked open, he launches himself out.

Gary Kendal -- Gary, two years ahead of him in school, one of Rick’s mates that he met after the Kaiju War ended, Gary whom Kieren keeps up with peripherally, and there’s a moment in which they make eye contact and Kieren _knows_ they’re both remembering that -- ducks under his lunge, drops his baton, and pivots with a sobriety Kieren isn’t expecting. In a moment, he has Kieren’s arms immobilized, yanked nearly vertical behind him. 

“Should’ve known,” he grunts, hauling Kieren up over the debris strewn across Jem’s floor. “Coulda bet we’d find you hiding under your sister’s clothes.”

He lifts his voice.

“We’ve got him, lads!”

Downstairs, a voice screams, and it cuts Kieren out at the knees as surely as if he’d been struck -- he didn’t know his mother could sound like that.

Gary huffs out a breath, craning backwards to support Kieren’s sudden dead weight and nearly unbalancing them down the stairs. “Come on, you rotter,” he snarls, and huffs again as Kieren abruptly surges up and kicks out viciously, knocking his own paintings off the wall. “Come on, you fucking --“

They stumble, almost fall. Kieren manages to get a foot levered against the wall and shoves them backward, hard, into the banister.

“ _Fucking --!“_ Gary howls. “Good God, you’re a piece of work. How could you -- fucking -- stand to get the Kaiju Blue in your system, god, I betcha -- I betcha you glow, huh, like those freaks --“

They reach the bottom of the stairs. 

Gary twists them around the banister, and Kieren registers movement coming at them a half-second before the impact sends them staggering.

Gary’s weight lifts off of him, just like that, and Kieren takes advantage of it by volleying himself out of his grip, ricocheting off the wall. He regains his balance and swing back around --

\-- just as Gary starts to scream. 

Blood smears down his face from crown to chin, black in the half-light, and Kieren catches sight of the hilt of one of their kitchen knives, gruesomely protruding from his eyeball.

He careens blindly, banging into their end table and upturning it, and Kieren’s little sister, Jem, advances on him, switching another knife to her dominant grip. Her socks have small, smiling frogs on them, and the expression on her face is pure and cold and clean.

“ _Go,_ Kier!” she shouts at him, and Kieren doesn’t look back. He bolts for the back door.

He passes his mother, who’s wrestling with another head hunter -- she has his weight bent back, a bag drawn taut over his head, his mouth making an airless gape in the plastic. Kieren rips his eyes away from them and slams out into the dark of the December night.

There’s a moment, a beautiful, simple moment, where he thinks he’s going to make it.

If he can get to the trees, if he can just get to the trees, he’d be good. He’s local and they might be head hunters, but they wouldn’t find Kieren Walker in the woods. You can’t catch a kaiju-creature in the woods. He chased rabbits with his sister out here. Rick Macy manhandled him into trees and pretended it was an accident out here.

But it only lasts a moment.

Something in the dark moves, and then Bill Macy steps right out into his path, a bored expression on his face, and Kieren, in fact, only makes it to the fence before a taser brings him down.

They bring him out to the waiting lorry. Maggie Burton from across the street is already planted in the back, and she stares at him with the most horrible look of grief on her face, her nightgown askew and her hair mashed down on one side from sleep.

“Oh, no,” she says, mouth crumpling. “Not you. Not you, lad.”

Her eyes, usually brown, are stained blue; a soft, glowing kaiju blue.

Kieren looks back at her and makes a choked noise in sympathy. The contacts, he knows from experience, dry out so fast, but the alternative is to get _caught._

Nearby, he hears Dean Halton saying, “so, ‘ow much for the pair of ‘em, then?” and, a beat later, “500 quid? No kiddin’?”

“Worth more than that, aren’t they?” Bill interjects calmly, before Dean can get too excited. A soft, metallic click: Bill lights a fag, and says around it, “Caught ‘em fresh. They’re early stages, en’t they. Saved you a bit of a pest problem later.”

Maggie whimpers, and Kieren scoots closer to her so that they can huddle against each other, their hands bound behind them. Somewhere, a man’s voice is still screaming: Ken Burton or Gary or Kieren’s dad, he won’t know.

He leaves it behind. 

He cuts it out of him, one dangling heartstring by heartstring, and he buries it in a place no one will ever walk.

 

*

 

Swiping his identity chip through, he asks without preamble, “Have you seen Simon this morning?”

“Hey! Good timing.” Amy straightens up. She looks at his clothes, eyebrows ticking up, and then visibly dismisses it. Instead, she gathers her hair and pulls it to the side. She’s head-to-toe in black nylon, except for where the fabric ends at her feet, clad in socks that are lumpy and labourer-grey. “Can you get the zip?”

Kieren steps over their boots, tossed out onto the center of their carpet, and zips the back of the drive-suit for her. Again, he asks, “Have you seen Simon?”

Her eyebrows form a cathedral arch. “I thought that’s where you were.”

“It was,” Kieren says, and a beat later, watches her expression tick over into understanding. Worry gathers like precipitation in her expression and she shakes her head.

He heaves in an inhale, steadies it, and then hefts it over the beaten-up wall that sits inside his chest. He forces visions of Norfolk out of his head -- that doesn’t even make sense, Kieren, this is the Aleutian.

This isn’t like Rick. Disappearance doesn’t automatically mean death.

“Here.” Amy slaps his chest. “Take your meds and get dressed. We’ll ask Phil. Maybe they moved him to A shift.”

He looks at the unappealing, gritty-looking pill she transfers to his hand, then sets it aside and starts stripping. He’s wearing Simon’s jumper, the grey one with the cables in it; he’d picked it up, thinking he could threaten him, jokingly, _I know you’re more attached to this jumper than your own life, so if you die, I’m keeping it._ It doesn’t seem the least bit funny right now. “If they did, it’s not going to stop what’s happening. Simon’s not the ringleader.”

“I know that,” she assures him, and they’re both aware that _he_ didn’t, not really, not until last night. “But they don’t.”

He dresses, and they sit down next to each other on the carpet to pull on their boots.

Before they leave, Amy says, “Wait.”

She goes to the closet, and Kieren watches her back, the trailing end of her braid, as she surfaces with the magazine cut-out. 

She folds back its ratty corners, touches the profiles of Mori and Beckett the same way he’s seen people kiss a cross, then puts it back and says, “Okay, let’s go.”

Today, they’re going the furthest away from the rig they’ve ever been -- out past the Zhemchug Canyon where they installed the first big purifier, out past the edge where the Bering shelf plunges into the Aleutian Basin. This pump will be placed deeper than any of the others, precariously close to the kind of depths that Blue hasn’t been tested for: the kind of depths that nothing since the three-jaeger strike on the breach has ever come close to.

It’s a journey of several hundred miles, and when Blue had been smaller, staying in the drift that long would have been doable, but now, instead, they’re going to rendezvous with the freight ship carrying the equipment for the pump and be transported the rest of the way to the installation site.

It’ll be the first time Kieren and Amy will attempt to establish a neural handshake outside of the ready room.

Phil Wilson isn’t concerned with this part. “You’ve never had a problem with it before,” he says. “So it shouldn’t be now.”

“Thanks, Phil,” says Amy, accepting her helmet from him as Kieren blinks in surprise. It’s weirdly bracing, having somebody as perpetually spineless as Phil be that confident in you.

“We’ll be monitoring you very carefully the entire time, of course.”

That’s Oliver, armed with a styrafoam cup reeking of overnight coffee.

As per usual, coming from him this sounds like a threat, but when Kieren glances sideways and catches the muscle twitching in Nina’s jaw, he can tell they’re worried, too.

Everyone’s on edge today.

As Nina adjusts her harness, Amy does something she’s never done before: unprompted, she stretches her arms out and draws Nina into a tight hug.

Nina’s face opens up, startled, and Kieren’s right there, so he sees it -- the wobbly line her mouth makes. Her hand lifts up and, with something almost like wonder, lands on Amy’s back. On her wrist, she still wears the nylon bracelet she’d made for her, its multicolored flowers run a little bedraggled.

She isn’t willing to open her mouth and reveal the sores, so she says nothing. The expression on her face is the same one she’s always worn around Amy; something shy, pained, and wistful, and Kieren hasn’t recognized it for what it was until this second.

_Oh,_ he thinks. _Oh, Nina._

He fits his helmet on, and somewhere, Phil must give the signal, because then it gives a whir and the Relay Gel starts flooding through into his drive suit, filling the membrane between the nylon and the armor plating.

When the visor clears of plasma, Kieren sees Nina positioning herself in front of them, her expression set.

She catches his eye, and then she braces her clipboard against her chest. It’s such an innocuous movement that at first, Kieren doesn’t even see it, and then he does: on the back of the clipboard, almost like it had been casually doodled there in a moment of boredom, Blue’s decal looks back at him, arms hefted over its head.

_Oh,_ he thinks, again.

Their eyes meet. 

It sinks in, then, _really_ sinks in: he and Amy are leaving now, and when they come back, the Aleutian rig will be under labourer control. For better or for worse, after today Nina Abdullah will be outed as an unregistered Zombie. 

She is choosing them over _them._

Phil’s voice drones, “Initiating neural handshake in five … four …”

They plunge into the blue.

And --

\-- Kieren’s dad picks them up off the pavement, and as he straightens their helmet and brushes the dust off their clothes, he says with what they (then age five) consider to be an extraordinary lack of sympathy, “That’s what happens when you go too fast, son,” and --

\-- a Cebuana in the City of Flowers sings her Latin in the shadow of the bone church and --

\-- Dr Geiszler claps a hand to Dr Gottlieb’s shoulder, laughing so hard he’s having trouble remaining upright while Dr Gottlieb darts a look at the camera and says in the aggrieved tone of someone who knows they’re being teased, “it’s in the _numbers,_ Newton,” and --

\-- Simon wades knee-deep in catfish, and they laugh at him from a rickety red staircase and he says, “Cackle all you like, Amy, I’m communing,” and they think he’s serious for the span of a single second before he looks up and moves his mouth fishily, crossing his eyes, and they laugh even harder and he says in his most sanctified tone, “no, really, this is a commune and these are my disciples” while gesturing at the fish flailing around his knees and -- 

\-- they pass on through, and Redeemer Blue straightens up and steps off the dock.

They crank open the door to the Bay, sending seawater swilling and eddying around Blue’s belly, and Kieren and Amy look out and are surprised to see that it’s snowing. The moon hasn’t set and the sun’s just risen, the clouds grey and haloed with light, and the snow falls in hard, dry flakes that the wind picks up and flings around like sand.

It doesn’t bother Blue, of course, but Kieren has a sudden vision of the Zombies working at the top of the Wall, the wind driving the snow into their faces with all the momentum it gathers on the way up. He pictures Frankie shielding her eyes, Simon with his head ducked down and the back of his neck exposed, right where the skin splits open. He --

Tension tightens at his spine, and Blue’s shoulders lock in response.

Amy’s mind immediately descends against his.

“Stop,” she tells him.

“Sorry,” he replies, and breathes until the calmness filters back into Blue’s mindspace between them.

His mouth tastes sour. He thinks he bit his cheek.

Amy waits, and then she says, “Come on.” She knows that they’ve got work to do, and because she knows, he knows it too. They have their work, and the labourers have theirs, and so do the supervisors and the K-scientists.

Kieren breathes in, Amy breathes out, and Blue steps into the cold grey of the Bering Sea.

 

*

 

*


	3. III: Tao

*

 

*

**PART THREE: TAO**

(tao, tao, Tagalog : human)

*

 

*

 

On the third round, Kieren lets himself be beat, and puts his cards down in order to get up and check on Blue.

At the stern, where the roar of the boat’s engines is the loudest, he leans out and watches the water churn up in a froth of white. Through the foam, he catches glimpses of Blue’s hull, towed along in their wake. 

Reassured, he goes back to the card game. The boat is small, painted red and crusted with salt, and crewed largely by people Kieren’s never seen before. Did the Prophet hire them? Did Phil? They hadn’t reacted with surprise when Blue broke the surface at the rendezvous point next to a tiny tugboat it could have fit into the palm of its hand, but Amy and Kieren’s blue-eyed appearance had been another thing. Even now, settling back down at the card table, the crewmen to his left and right edge away, seemingly unconsciously.

 _Is it nice?_ he wonders. Having the luxury of not being reminded of the kaiju every day of your life?

(That’s unfair, he tells himself, shaking it off. After all, they make their living on a contaminated sea, don’t they?)

“Hey, Ranger,” says a crewman on Amy’s right. “Heard you speak Filipino, yeah?”

Kieren, busy scanning the table to see what state the game’s in, glances up absently. The card table is a mix of crewmen and J-techs from the rig, whose job it is to strap Kieren and Amy safely back into Blue when they reach the drop zone. He’d thought they’d meet the freighter a few miles out from the rig and store Blue on board with the pump, but there’d only been a tugboat waiting instead, looking infinitesimal and entirely squashable to Kieren’s Blue-heightened perception. It still would have been faster for Blue to swim itself, but Kieren gets the impression that with the PPDC watching, parts and fuel for Blue are just going to get harder and harder to obtain.

“Hm?” He tunes back into the question at hand. “Oh, yeah. I do.”

The crewman who spoke lifts her eyebrows, glancing sidelong at Livia with her sharp teeth starting to show. Realizing his mistake, Kieren opens his mouth, but it’s already too late.

Livia, a navy-shirted technician, plants her elbows on the table, squaring herself off. Kieren’s seen her playing cards once or twice in the administrator’s mess, and even a few times in the observation break room (before Simon sabotaged the coffee maker,) and he’s pretty sure this deck is hers. It’s a J-tech deck: in Kieren’s abandoned hand, three kaiju heads like the kind they use to represent kill counts on jaeger profiles grimace at him from a three of spades. The king is the glowing nuclear core of a Mark III jaeger, and Striker Eureka’s bulldog emblem wears a Joker’s crown.

“Do you now?” Livia says, with national pride. “Which one? Binisaya? Ilocano? Pampango?”

Livia had been born in Manila before it became a city-cemetery. She’d conducted their interview when he and Amy applied as drift-compatible candidates, and he’s spoken to her a few times since then, especially after she saw the Mark III designs he drew for Blue -- she knows full well which languages Kieren’s competent in. But she addresses him several different times in several different regional dialects that he _doesn’t_ know until the whole table is laughing and Kieren’s miserably saying, “Tagalog. When I said Filipino, I meant standardized Tagalog. I’m sorry, Livia, I won’t say it again.”

“Hm,” says Livia, but she’s smiling.

They outpace the snow, and the next time Kieren goes above-decks, the clouds have pulled themselves into a patchwork of light and dark, sun breaking through in the thinnest spots. 

He checks on Blue again, then looks behind him at the superstructure. Through the glass panes, he sees the tugboat captain -- an Aleut woman wearing a Star Wars Episode IX sweatshirt on under her parka -- and one of the techs from the rig sharing a single pair of headphones and identical consternating frowns.

Kieren’s stomach swoops, and, annoyed with himself -- what can he do? Whatever happens on the rig will happen -- he goes to find his copilot.

Amy handles her nervousness by flirting with single-minded determination, much to the bemusement of the crewman to her right and her left, who keep looking at each other like they aren’t sure if they’re supposed to be competition or what. They’ve been on a pitching boat with Zombies all morning, but this is what’s unsettling them?

Well, Amy does have that effect on people.

When they reach the rendezvous point, Livia collects her winnings and stands, saying, “Come on, pilots, let’s go for a dive.”

At a point almost directly centered in the middle of the Bering Sea, surrounded by open water for several hundred miles in each direction, they meet with the slow-moving freighter carrying the parts for the new purification pump. 

Nothing on the surface suggests that below them, the Bering shelf cuts abruptly downward, forming into several immense, sawtooth canyons. They’re not far from the position they placed the first purification pump, strategically at the mouth of the Zhemchug Canyon -- a quick chemical test of the water around them shows a remarkable lack of contamination, which impresses the boat crew -- but this one will be placed even deeper than that.

They bring Blue to the surface, and the techs take extra care when strapping Kieren and Amy into the PONs system. They’re a long way from home and they’ve got farther to go yet, and the depths at which they’ll be working will strain them even though this is exactly what Blue was made for.

“Hey, pilots, are you taking dinner requests?” a tech asks.

Amy lifts her hand to the “speak” button. “No dinner requests, Donald, but if I meet a mutant fish I’ll give her your number, you’ll get along _swimmingly.”_

Several groans answer her, and she lifts her eyebrows at Kieren, like, _what? I thought that was good._

Reentering the drift this far away from the familiar surroundings of the ready room is a jarring, like coming up on a turn before you’ve reduced your speed; Kieren rocks and wobbles, regaining his balance before the blue can tumble out from underneath him and send him plunging. Then he passes on through, and Amy’s mind greets him easily on the other side.

“Neural handshake stabilized,” announces the computer.

“Ready?” Livia asks them over the com.

“Redeemer Blue ready!” Kieren and Amy confirm in unison.

“Copy that. Escort to base,” she hails, letting them overhear. “Blue is beginning the descent.”

There’s a pause, and then she relays, “Base confirms and wishes you godspeed.”

Amy’s voice turns syrupy. “Awww, thanks, Phil!” And Livia snorts.

Blue pulls free of the tugboat and paddles over to the freighter, where a recycled-model Demag crawler they recognize from previous dives comes around to them slowly, bringing a heavy metal base plate to hang suspended above their head. The crane is nearly as long as they are, and maybe just as heavy, its treads magnetized in place so it doesn’t slip on the icy deck. Crewmen with tablets in hand linger around, eyeballing the exchange and absorbed in conversation.

And when it happens, it seems to happen with near tectonic slowness; the whole world slowed down to let its heart beat one metre at a time.

Premonition prickles the back of Kieren’s neck.

He turns one of Blue’s lenses behind them, zeroing in on the tugboat superstructure, where through the glass the techs supervise the equipment which in turn supervises Blue. One of the techs rises out of his chair, a hand pressing into his commset, the other covering his ear to hear better. As Kieren watches, the color leaves his face all at once, like ice coming off glass in a sheet.

 _Ah,_ he thinks.

The tech spins, saying something to the others, and they all freeze in place. Even the captain comes to attention. 

Kieren turns his head a fraction, intending to tell Amy that it’s starting, but a disturbance ripples from her to him.

One arm is lifted, the HUD around it displaying her arm shifted into its “catch” mode; two bracing forks ready to catch the metal base like plates on a platter. She lifts her other hand to the “speak” button. 

“Escort, wait, there’s something -- my helmet --“

Except it doesn’t go through, because the techs have already patched through to them. Their transmission crackles over hers.

Livia says something.

At first, it’s unintelligible, just static and syllables and urgency. Behind her, somebody shouts audibly, “No, _don’t!”_ and Amy makes a dumbfounded noise, her mouth half-parted on a second “wait -- I’m not --“

And then it all arranges inside Kieren’s head: Livia spoke to them in Tagalog.

“Brace yourself,” she says.

And that’s all the warning they get.

With a soft, almost innocuous _thunk,_ the magnetized clamp releases. The crane groans, and for a single moment, everything remains suspended like that, like something that’s gotten preserved in a spiderweb, like Rick sitting poised and still on the cave floor, like the look on Delilah's face the second the glass left Amy's hand, aimed for her head.

And then gravity grabs hold again.

Crewmen on the freighter shout and bolt out from underneath the crawler’s treads, diving for safety. The crane, too close to the edge and too weighted, leans and leans and then tips completely, plunging overboard. 

The metal base swings towards Blue’s head like the flat side of a hammer.

Kieren flings his arm up, but Amy is a beat too slow.

The impact jars right through them and throws them against their harnesses. Something on Amy’s side snaps, and Kieren feels a white-hot spike of fear shoot through her brain a second before her helmet collides with the hull, and her skull cracks against the inside of her helmet.

The lights shudder. He twists frantically in Amy’s direction, and she looks back at him, staggering forward to regain her balance, and then her eyes roll into her head.

She slumps.

“ _AMY!”_

Kieren has only a second, only a single second, before the supports holding Blue’s mind up out of the drift snap like toothpicks. The full weight of it slams into him.

It obliterates him completely.

“Pilots out of alignment,” announces the computer, pleasantly calm.

Kieren opens his mouth, but there’s no air, no space in his lungs, and no words besides. 

Everything crushes out of him. Without Amy next to him, Blue flattens him.

Even the pain is momentarily nonexistent, stomped out, and then it comes careening back.

He clamps his mouth shut, and the sensation of something flooding through his mouth is lost under everything else. Every limb is titanium alloy, every joint a hydraulic hiss, but his muscles are just Kieren Walker’s muscles and they tremble with the strain of Blue’s weight. 

Both hemispheres are his. The effort of it is Atlasian, like trying to move a section of the Kaiju Wall by himself.

He’s aware, distantly, that he’s ensnared and plunging fast: the base for the purification pump, the chains, and the crane had gotten tangled with Blue when they fell, all but pinning their arms to their sides. It’s sinking them like a deadweight.

 _Lights,_ he tells Blue, and they flood on, illuminating the gloom of the deep ocean. Below them, the lip of the canyon looks like the edge of a torn page, with nothing beyond it but black. It’s approaching fast.

How had they fallen that quickly?

And what _happened?_ It was almost like --

Almost -- almost like they’d released the locks holding the crane in place on -- on _orders._

That thought hurts. Every thought hurts. Every thought that fires through his head fires through Blue’s; it is circuitry, and it singes. As a Zombie, he could stand anything else, but his brain is the most vulnerable part of him and he can’t --

He twists, trying to wriggle their arms or fire the jet propulsors to slow their descent, or _anything --_

Blue barely responds. The exertion leaves him trembling and panting, crushed and horribly, _horribly_ alone.

“Pilots out of alignment,” the computer insists. “Drift instability critical.”

“Shut up,” Kieren gasps out. “Escort! Base -- Livia -- Phil -- please -- it’s Amy --“

He searches the drift, hunting for the stepping stones he could put his feet on.

They’ve always been there. 

The stones are the things worth living for, as rock-solid steady in the wash of blue as the RABITs are fleeting: memories of flowers in Amy’s hair, Mahmoud changing his definition of home so that it includes them, Simon’s bare legs against his, a tiny Jem with no teeth being brave enough for the both of them --

Where ...

The drift is a blue, shouting cacophony, and he cannot find purchase.

He’s seeing double, inside the cockpit and outside of it; they pass the lip of the canyon gorge, solid rock walls rushing up on either side like ghosts out of the gloom. Blue is specifically built for breach-depth dives, but there are some depths that’ll crush even Blue and there’s no telling how far they’ll fall while he’s incapacitated.

Jaegers are equipped for this kind of thing; how to compensate when one pilot is offline, but somewhere in Blue’s programming they must have skipped this failsafe. Blue is, after all, only meant to be a jaeger knock-off. It was never meant to face danger. Kieren can’t move Amy’s arm at all, can’t move their legs or fire their jets or _anything._ Blue needs a two-pilot system, and all it has right now is Kieren.

If only he could grab onto something …

The canyon walls are impossibly far away. Seemingly equidistant, it feels like, is Amy, unconscious body lolling in her harness, head tipping side to side. Blood slicks everything under her nose. He can’t feel her.

He can’t feel her or reach her and he can’t move Blue and everything is the _dark_ and the crush of deep, deep blue --

\-- and the _weight_ \--

Amy gasps.

Her mind flickers to life next to Kieren’s, cool kaiju-blue rushing into their heads and the current of the drift roaring around them, and in the next instant, the propulsors fire and the canyon wall leaps towards them --

Blue’s hand clamps down on an overhang.

The momentum carries them right into the rock, the successive impact of droid and plate and crane breaking off chunks as easily as chalk. They drift, slowed by the weight of the water. Kieren shifts his grip, and Blue’s metal joints screech in protest as the crane and its load slowly start to drag them downwards again. He only pays enough attention to make sure it’s not enough to pull them off the overhang, and then diverts entirely.

Amy’s mind is chaos, impulses firing and fragmenting with pain, scattering like buckshot in the drift. RABITs dart underfoot in all directions.

“Amy!”

There’s something wrong with his voice.

Her head comes up. “Kieren?”

In an instant, a white-out lightning-strike instant, they see each other -- with their own eyes and then with the other’s.

Kieren sees himself, mirrored across from her. Lights scream and flash from all over the cockpit, the computer trying to warn them of too many things at once. Their HUDS are patchy, some systems still steady and kaiju-blue, others gone shockingly red, wailing in alarm.

But worse than that -- worse than that -- his _face --_

His mouth gapes, still caught in the shape of her name. His lips and teeth are blue and black. Fresh, crystal-blue blood streaks down his chin. It comes from his nose. It comes from his ears. Luminescent, phosphorescent.

Every orifice glows. He can barely make out his own eyes, looking back at her.

 _No,_ he thinks, and the jolt of horror sends him slipping. Losing his footing, he plunges, and the drift instantly closes over his head, tearing him away from Blue and Amy. The current strips him raw and every muscle screams. Distantly, he’s aware of Blue’s hand tightening, the overhang crumbling under the strain, of Amy making a soft, terrible noise.

Kieren Walker missed eight doses of his anti-kaiju meds. Kieren Walker hasn’t had his mouth filed.

 _I can’t go feral!_ he insists to himself. 

_I can’t go kaiju, not now!_

And then --

He feels it lance through the drift, as sharp as the tip of a knife driven straight into his ribs --

\-- Amy dies.

Just like that.

He feels it, the exact moment it happens: every neuron in her brain stops firing and goes dark, and when he reaches for her, there is nothing nothing nothing _nothing --_

\-- nothing but a goneness --

\-- a terrible and horrible _nothing_ in the place where there’d been all of Amy --

He opens his mouth and _screeches._

It’s a kaiju sound, and it tears out of him like it’s ripping through the breach to get there. The water around them boils. Or it feels like it’s boiling. Messages from Blue’s hull signal to his brain that the water is boiling, dangerously, terribly hot, but it could just be the only way Blue knows how to respond to what Kieren’s making it feel.

The overhang is gone, crumbled to dust in his grip.

They begin, inexorably, to fall.

 _No, no, no!_ Kieren thinks desperately, but he can’t lift his arms, can’t move his legs, can’t fire his repulsors and there at the end of every thought is the black-mawed _gape._ It is Freddie Preston gone over the railing, it is his baby sister driving a knife into a man’s eyeball, and he can’t, he _can’t_ \--

Come on, Kieren. Come on. 

If Raleigh Beckett could pilot Gipsy Danger solo long enough to get her to shore, then so can you.

Except Kieren isn’t Beckett -- he isn’t. He never has been. Kieren’s just a labourer who didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Amy’s the only thing that made him a Ranger and she’s _gone._

She’s gone and he --

\-- without her --

\-- _feral_ \--

He can’t --

It’s curious, just how similar the sensations of dying and falling really are.

 

*

 

And then --

The feeling of being _caught._

 

*

 

Everything washes away blue, and from it, a hand fastens tight around Kieren’s wrist.

He grabs back, clawing and desperate for one beat, then two, grateful for anything and terrified --

\-- and --

\-- Rick is saying, “You’re all right, mate.”

He pulls, and Kieren stops falling. 

Kieren stops falling because Rick Macy is pulling him back up, and the whole drift is blue except for him and his smile. Color spreads from that smile outwards, lighting his eyes and his chest and Kieren and suddenly, they are standing in the middle of Lark Lane. Rick’s house sits huddled by the fence, its bricks hunched up around its ears, bamboo windchime clacking from the stoop.

There are no leaves on the trees. Birds dip across the sky, lighting briefly atop the siren that rises out of the churchyard, the one that goes off when the rainfall comes in toxic.

The Rick that holds onto his wrist is Rick as he was the first time he ever spoke to Kieren; eleven years old, wearing his football kit, a tiny, world-weary furrow between his very young eyebrows.

“All right?” he asks.

“All right, mate,” Kieren parrots back, dazed.

The line between Rick’s brows smooths out, and he shows his teeth. Affection, painful in its intensity, burns the inside of Kieren’s chest, like he’s left his heart and lungs out on the hob too long, and drawing in a breath feels like he’s gone scraping the bottom of the pan for them. 

“I got you, Ren,” Rick tells him, gently.

“I know.”

“But you’ve got to go.”

Kieren looks at him, bewildered, and Rick’s fingers tighten around his wrist.

“Up,” he says. “You’ve got to go up. Anyone can fall, and now you’ve got to climb again.”

“How?” Kieren asks.

“I’ll help you.”

Kieren feels his mouth skew. His fingers fumble inside his collar, digging for the latch to his helmet. He pulls it off and it falls to the tarmac with a crack. His face is tacky with kaiju blood, and now it’s on his gloves, too. He catalogues himself quickly: he feels bone-wire thin, shaky, but not particularly out of control or predatory or even that dead.

He didn’t think going feral would be like this, but then again, he doesn’t think anyone’s gone feral in the drift before. 

“No offense,” he says to his best friend, who’d died from contamination nearly four years ago. “But I’m a bit heavy for you.”

“Fuck off,” Rick snorts. “You’re no burden, Ren. Love en’t heavy at all.”

And without really moving, Kieren feels himself being boosted up.

“I -- _wait_ \--“

He grabs at Rick, clinging, and Rick grins at him. “You’ll always find me in the drift,” he says easily. “I’ll see you around, yeah?”

From above, another hand grabs his other wrist, and Rick pushes him upward. 

Lark Lane vanishes, and Kieren looks up.

“Come on, you,” Dorothy Dyer says to him. She hauls him up in a no-nonsense way. “You’ve got miles to go before you can sleep.”

She holds onto him with one hand, and with the other, briskly brushes imaginary dirt off the armored plates of his drive suit. Amy’s nan has iron-grey curls helmeted close to her head, and the kind of all-denim outfit that had gone out of style some thirty years before Kieren had been born. They’re surrounded by carpeting that’s indistinguishable from any skirt Amy’s ever worn.

“Mrs Dyer --“ he starts to protest, and then at her look, corrects himself, “Nan. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t pilot without -- I can’t pilot Blue alone.”

“Don’t be daft,” she tells him, calmly. “You’re not alone.”

And up he goes.

“Oh, no,” says Kieren.

“It’s those bloody UKIPs, I’m telling you,” Grandad Winkerschtein tells him with the knowingness of the thoroughly convinced, squinty-eyed. He bobbles in his rocker, jabbing one skinny finger in Kieren’s direction. “ _Politicians._ Bah! If you see one o’ them, you turn and run the other way, got it?”

“It’s the PPA, Grandad,” Kieren corrects him.

“Eh? The who?”

Kieren’s grandfather had already been admitted to a care facility before construction on the Anti-Kaiju Wall started. He probably still remembers the Pan-Pacific Alliance as something that happened _elsewhere_ and therefore didn’t concern the British at all. He’s also been dead for most of Kieren’s life -- if this is death, it isn't being very welcoming. Maybe this is what drives people feral, he thinks ruefully. Not burst polyps, but visions of grandparents.

“Never mind.”

He stoops and gives Grandad Winkerschtein a one-armed hug that earns him another virulent “bah!” and then turns away, but there’s already another hand grabbing for him.

This time, he reaches back.

They come out of the drift, one-by-one -- all of the people of his life, catching him and pulling him, pushing him, putting their backs up against the howling, awful blue for him. Here’s Maggie Burton, kindly smiling, and Alex from Norfolk, and Freddie Preston, who gives Kieren’s wrist a squeeze and just says, “Thanks, mate.”

After him, of course, comes Clementine Watson, who hikes up her cuff to show him Blue’s decal on her wrist and says, “They warned us it was a possibility that we’d die for you -- but no one said anything about it being the other way around.”

“Clementine …”

“No,” she gives no quarter. “You’re not dying. Not today. We’re not going to let it.”

She lifts him up, and next Kieren knows, he’s standing next to Dr Newt Geiszler, the second half of the most famous pair of K-scientists to come out of the war.

“Um.” He blinks, startled.

The cathedral materializes out of the drift, arching all around them, and stained glass smears at Dr Geiszler’s back. He’s wearing glasses and a skinny tie.

“Yo, dude,” he’s saying. “I just want to say, like, sorry about the whole ‘Zombie’ thing.”

“Sorry for …” Kieren keeps blinking.

“I didn’t _really_ hate you. I might have -- ah -- said some things that made people think otherwise, which is really dumb, because come on, man,” he flattens his hands against his chest. “ _Me?_ Hate kaiju? _Please,_ it’s like nobody even knows me. I just didn’t think it was fair, you know? _I’m_ the one who drifted with a kaiju brain -- if there’s anyone who gained special powers, it should have been _me._ I just didn’t like you guys for that.”

He slaps Kieren’s back and grins.

“No hard feelings, right?”

Without waiting for a reply, he says, “good man,” and hands him up to Mahmoud, who lifts his fist and smiles when Kieren bumps it without hesitation. The world, coalescing sharp-edged out of the blue, forms streets Kieren doesn’t recognize, with rounded American kerbs and shivering evergreen trees that flank the buildings. When mountains form in the distance, he realizes this must be Montana, the town that Mahmoud has been aching to share with them. 

Mahmoud says, “You ain’t allowed to die until you stand as my best man, you got that, tea-time?”

“I thought Brian …”

“Nah,” Mahmoud says peaceably. His eyes crinkle, and Kieren knows that, unlike Newt Geiszler, Mahmoud never played any zombie shoot ‘em games when he was young -- and as with most things, if you aren’t trained to kill it, you run the risk of falling in love with it. “My Wonder Woman wants Brian to be her maid of honor.”

Kieren shrugs, because yeah, that sounds like Zoe.

It’s like he’s being fished out deep from the depths of the drift. Mahmoud passes him to his wife-to-be, who hauls him up to Frankie, who pushes him on to Min Seong, who gives him to Henry Lonsdale, who is singing to the drift with all his heart. And when Kieren meets his eyes, he smiles so broadly it makes his hymn thin out like it’s smiling, too. Kieren smiles back and knows, then, exactly where Zoe’s coming from.

 _If they hurt you,_ he thinks. _I’ll throw every last one of them off the Wall._

And up -- everyone’s here, it seems like. Everyone who has ever changed his life, and everyone … everyone whose lives changed because of _him._

They all come to his aid now; their familiar, wonderful faces forming a human chain to save him.

A hand grabs his wrist. Kieren looks up.

His heart pulps up and batters itself against his ribs.

“Jem,” he says on a shredded breath.

His little sister pulls. She is not the same Jem he left standing by the staircase in her socks, a knife in her hand. The whole shape of her face has changed: she’s older, her hair longer and two-toned, swinging down to the small of her back. Kieren doesn’t even wait for the drift to stabilize around them -- he drags her into a fierce hug.

She tolerates it for a beat or two, and then shakes him off.

“Did I tell you?” she says to him excitedly. “I’m nineteen in three weeks! Do you think that makes _you my_ little brother?”

“No,” Kieren responds. And, “definitely not,” for good measure.

She shows him all of her teeth. 

“Go on,” she puts a hand in the center of his back and shoves. “You don’t want to be late, lil’ bro.”

“ _Dick,”_ he huffs out incredulously. And then, “Wait, late for what?”

He’s already reaching up, half-turned and just as unwilling to take his eyes off Jem’s face as he had been Rick’s, and a hand reaches down to grab him. Somehow, in the way of the drift, Kieren knows that this is it. Jem’s the last and most important person in his chain, and what’s next is something else entirely.

He looks up, and isn’t surprised at all to see that it’s Simon.

He pulls Kieren up, and Kieren pulls him in.

They stand like that for a long moment, foreheads together in a Mori-and-Beckett kind of way, arms around each other. There’s blue in Simon’s eyes and blue on his throat, and Kieren, for once, matches.

And if everyone knows that Simon loves him, then everyone should also know that Kieren looks at Simon the same way Nina looks at Amy in the ready room, the same way Mahmoud watches Zoe like he’d follow her to sea.

 _I forgot to tell you that,_ he thinks. _I told you a lot of things, but I didn’t tell you that._

The drift is completely quiet.

Simon draws back, but only far enough to look at him and murmur, lowly, in that deep drag of a voice like he’d dived into the breach to fetch it, “You’re incredible.”

“No, I’m not,” Kieren says easily. “I’m only as incredible as the rest of you make me.”

And then lifts his eyebrows, like, _That was clever, right?_

Simon’s eyes crinkle at the corners, an expression so familiar to his face that Kieren knows he would recognize it, no matter how feral he is.

They pull away from each other, and Kieren realizes, abruptly, what’s missing. If Jem was the last link in his chain, then Simon is here to make a clasp. Someone’s not here.

Together, in unison, they turn and kneel down in the current so that they can fish Amy out.

Her hand closes securely around Simon’s wrist, and she darts her eyes upward long enough to determine that it’s them before they’re drawn downwards again, like gravity’s got a hold of them. 

Kieren follows her gaze, and there -- at the end of Amy’s chain -- is Delilah Doolittle.

She meets his eyes over Amy’s head and smiles. 

Kieren Walker has never said a word to Delilah in his life, but he could find his way through their old London apartment blindfolded. He has a hundred and one memories of her; her hair in the sink, her weight pushing the wheelchair, her hands stringing the herbs up in the pantry. He remembers her face when she heard the terminal diagnosis -- Delilah, a lightning-split second, looking relieved.

He remembers a rooftop in London, that last V-K Day before everything changed, watching the fireworks that they set off every year in Trafalgar Square. The memory of Delilah’s hands in Amy’s hair is overlaid with the memory of Rick’s hand battering at his back, his whoop close to Kieren’s ear. V-K Day is the one day of the year the ban on Kieren Walker was lifted at the Legion (“still … glowing a bit, then?”), and Rick bought a round for everyone, a then-underage Jem and her friend Lisa Lancaster included. It jumbles underneath his skin; Delilah’s mouth, Rick’s hand, the sticky barroom counter and cardboard coasters and the smear of the fireworks against the sky --

“Let go,” Delilah says softly.

And Amy says, “I can’t.”

“Amy, you have to.”

But Amy shakes her head. “ _No,”_ she says, with the smallest, fiercest noise, because her heart bleeds affection the way some people bleed blood, the way kaiju bleed blue, and being Delilah Doolittle’s girlfriend had defined her for so long that she doesn’t know who she is if she doesn’t love that girl.

If Kieren Walker’s greatest weakness is that he can’t let people get close, then Amy’s is that she can’t let people go.

Fear turns silvery and sharp inside of him, slicing into him undefended: he could lose her.

They are this close, _this_ close, and Amy could still be a forever kind of dead.

“Amy,” Kieren says.

His voice climbs out of him like it was passed up a chain, stretched thin and wavering, and he reaches for his co-pilot.

And suddenly it’s the easiest thing in the world, and Delilah slips from her fingers. Amy watches her go, and then lets them pull her up. They set her on her feet, and she looks at them, all of her love on her face. 

“So,” she says brightly. “Are we dead?”

“No,” Simon tells her, holding her by the elbows. “You’re not.”

“Well, that doesn’t make sense.” Amy looks at Kieren and asks, looking almost insulted, “How’d that happen?”

“We gave it our best shot,” Kieren tells her dryly.

Amy throws her head back and laughs, and then she turns, her arms going around Simon’s neck.

They hold each other breathlessly tight, swaying in place for one moment, then another, their heads buried in each other’s shoulders. Simon murmurs something too low for Kieren to hear, and Amy’s fingers fist at his back.

They release each other and turn to Kieren. 

Simon takes his hand in one of his and Amy’s in the other, and join them together in front of him.

They twine their fingers with each other’s, Simon’s palms an almost humanly warm clamshell around them, love and a blessing in the way he presses down. The significance of a priest performing a handfasting isn’t lost on them, and Kieren meets Amy’s eyes and finds her beaming back at him. Well, she always _did_ want a wedding.

Where one goes, the other goes. That’s non-negotiable.

Then Simon’s hands are gone, Simon’s hands and his shoulders that'll bear anything and his collar and his fried spine and his terrible hair, and it’s just Kieren and Amy, and the hands holding them together now are Blue’s. Blue’s hands -- enormous and made for building -- cradle them the way you’d cup tadpoles in a stream, gentle and reverent and so very careful.

 _Caught you,_ it thinks.

_Caught you. Safe._

Amy looks at Kieren. She moves for him, and their arms go around each other seamlessly. There are flowers beneath their feet, spilling between Blue’s fingers, and they are not dead. Not today.

Together, in synchrony, they turn and step into the drift.

The blue falls on their shoulders, as quiet and light as rain.

 

*

 

“-- calibrated. Drift stability at 92%. 96%.”

Kieren comes to at the same moment Amy does, and as one, they pull Blue’s legs up, bracing themselves against the treads of the crawler and torquing at the waist. The twist unravels the chain that tethers the deadweight to them enough for Amy to shift the function of her hand. She neatly bolt-cuts the chain at its weakest point, right there where it meets the hook.

For a second, the crane and metal plate remains suspended in the water, and then slowly, they fall out of the beam of their floodlights, vanishing completely.

They push off -- Kieren’s knuckles squeal at the hinges when they release their grip on the rock he’d been holding, broken off from the overhang -- and jet upwards, leaving the canyon far below, coalescing again into darkness.

Blue breaks the surface without stopping, jettisoning them into the air with all the grace of a gorilla-armed dolphin. They splash back down again, waves cresting over Blue’s glass casing. They can see every droplet of spray scattering across the sea, crystalline and pale, each of them with a kernel of April sunshine locked inside.

They spend a minute or two just bobbing there, and then Amy asks, “Do you see anyone?”

She looks left and he looks right, but the sea is empty: this far out, even the blue-contaminated icebergs are absent.

Blue’s sonar is empty; no ships at the surface, and nothing below, spare a school of fish who are minding their own business two kilometers out.

“Okay,” Amy drags it out slowly. “Where did they go?”

It’s rhetorical, because the answer could be anything but most importantly is _not here._

“What do you think happened?”

“I think the diversion happened.” She says it confidently. He looks over at her, seeing both inside the cockpit and out of it simultaneously; the bright, flat ocean around Blue and his copilot, her HUD a hovering spectre around her arm and helmet. “Livia warned you, didn’t she?”

_Brace yourself._

“Yes.”

“And then someone back at the rig gave them the order to drop the crane on us.”

A vision fills the drift; Phil Wilson, a knife clutched white-knuckled in both hands, lifting it above his head like he’s preparing to plunge it into the heart of something. Kieren lets it wash away into the blue before he remarks, “Was that metaphorical?”

“Shhh,” Amy chides.

She pauses, and they pass it back and forth between the hemispheres in their brains, trying to unravel it: Livia’s warning, the crane sinking them, the unceremonious abandonment by both the freighter and the tugboat.

“They must have left us here on purpose,” she says finally. “To protect us from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Whose? The labourers’ or the PPDC’s?”

“Both.”

Slowly, they fold up Blue’s legs and turn on the jet propellers. They make large circles around the spot where they surfaced, not unlike how they do when they’re testing water for Antigen K contamination and collecting soil samples for the K-scientists. Nothing shows up on sonar.

“Freighters don’t move very fast,” Kieren points out.

She nods. “We must have been … out for a long time.”

As they scout, the sun rolls again beneath the horizon, the clouds moving in. The waters turn choppy; water and sky both become nothing more than one form of blackness slicing away at another. Blue isn’t frightened by anything as inconsequential as rough seas, but it suggests they head back to the Bay now.

Kieren and Amy glance sidelong at each other. Go back? Isn’t the Bay the last place they want to be?

Yes, but where else is there? And don’t they want to know what’s going on?

Don’t they want to help?

Hours into the night, as they get nearer to base (they’d traveled farther than they’d thought to get to the canyon,) Kieren pauses -- their forward momentum tapers off, and Amy adjusts so that they don’t overcompensate.

 _What?_ she says or thinks. They’ve been in the drift for so long by this point there’s very little to differentiate.

_Do you hear that?_

Above -- a motor. Rotary blades, chopping away. 

Kieren turns one of Blue’s lenses upward. A helicopter materializes, heading towards them -- no, two. No, three of them. They telescope in to see better, and the wind catches at the one in the lead, drifting it sideways enough that the PPDC emblem on the side becomes visible.

 _Down!_ Kieren and Amy think in a flash, and Blue sinks beneath the surface like a stone.

They power off, all systems going dark, and wait. Blue’s cockpit creaks on every side, and the vents wheeze once, recycling oxygenated air back to them; it’s pointless, since neither Kieren nor Amy are breathing, as if somehow _that_ would give them away. If those helicopters are scanning the sea for anything, hopefully Blue will look like debris from the Wall of Life, or an iceberg.

The muffled _whumph!_ of rotary blades pass overhead, and then the sound fades. When enough time has passed, they reboot the system with their minds and rise to the surface again.

Twinkling lights are just barely visible in the distance, receding. They’re on an unerring path for the Aleutian rig.

Amy curses quietly, and immediately Kieren tells her, “They weren’t big enough to be carrying soldiers.”

“… thanks,” she says. “That’s reassuring.”

Blue paddles in place while Kieren and Amy both assess their options. They can’t go back to the Aleutian; Phil Wilson and the techs dropped them in the middle of the Bering Sea the way you would a corpse tied down with rocks for a reason, and whatever state the labourers’ rebellion is in, it won’t help them to waltz up and hand Redeemer Blue to the PPDC.

Besides, Blue isn’t a weapon.

The jaegers were built for battle, but Blue was built to … well, build.

“So where do we go?” Amy asks.

The question lances through him as cleanly as if she’d shot him with a rivet gun. She asks it with an answer already in mind: she wants to go home.

For a moment, they both sway in their harnesses, overcome with the weight of that wish, swelling and over-amplified in the drift like she’d shouted it inside a cavernous space. There’d been a jaeger pilot once -- Kieren couldn’t remember who; one of the Jessops, or maybe even one of the Beckett brothers -- who said that when you’re in a jaeger, you don’t have to batten down against the hurricane or cower from it. You can walk through it.

This feels like that: he and Amy are here with Blue and they can go _anywhere._

They could swim from one end of the globe to another. They could cross through the belly of the Pacific Ocean and wash up on an unknown shore, far away from the foreman’s threats and the labourer greys and Oliver’s hurtful ignorance and all the stupid jokes about their sex life.

They could put Blue on the shore and walk until he saw Jem’s face again.

It’s this image -- casually parking Blue on the street outside Kieren’s house and making Ken Burton drop his hedge-trimmers -- that makes Amy laugh, and then she reminds him, gently, “We only have so much fuel, handsome.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and the world map in their head shrinks.

There’s also the problem of how they’re going to disengage their neural handshake: it’s not a matter of simply taking off their helmets and stepping out of their boots, partially because Blue isn’t wired like that and partially because if they try, they’re just going to plunge into the drift where all those people are waiting. It’s not something they want to risk, not with the scare they’ve just had; Amy’s already died today, and Kieren still has fresh blood in his mouth. 

They have no point of reference here.

“Kieren Walker,” says Amy thoughtfully. “How do you feel about a Shatterdome?”

“I thought they were all sold at private auction. None of them actually function anymore.”

She shows her teeth. “I guess we’ll find out.”

 

*

 

To reach Anchorage, Kieren and Amy and Redeemer Blue will have to cross the Aleutian range, a ring of volcanic peaks that collar the Bering Sea like a necklace, all the way from Alaska to Russian territory. Largely uninhabited except for the settlement at Unalaska, they exist now like rocky, marshy growths on the back of the Wall of Life, which separate them from the Pacific Ocean. The tram that takes labourers from the rig to the Wall and back passes between two of these peaks, but not close enough for Kieren and Amy to remember them as anything other than smudges outside the window.

“Good thing we don’t have to eat or piss!” Amy jokes, as they try to plot the quickest path. “There’s the advantage of being a Zombie pilot.”

The only chocolates that Kieren’s family could buy with their ration points were the ones sold at the Shop n’ Save, and they always came with jaeger pilot trading cards, and one of them floats up out of Kieren’s memory now: Sasha Kaidanovskya and Aleksis Kaidanovsky held the record for the longest sustained drift, at eighteen hours.

And while his and Amy’s neural handshake definitely hadn’t remained sustained -- he’s pretty sure having your copilot die mid-drift bars you from being a record-breaker -- he knows they’ve been in Blue for at least that long by now. 

“Amy,” he says. “We do have to sleep eventually.”

“So sleep, Kieren,” she tells him quietly. “The drift is quiet, and if you slip too far away, Rick will turn you back to me.”

In the interest of conserving fuel, they decide to cut a straight line from their current position to the Shatterdome, which involves crossing the mountains at the point they anchor to the continent at a thick patch of land where Kvichak Bay drives an arrowhead into mainland Alaska. Kodiak Island -- another trading card -- waits in the Gulf of Alaska on the other side. It’ll be the first time Redeemer Blue has ever walked on solid ground.

They turn and put the Aleutian rig behind them. They swim.

Sometime later, Amy’s voice breaks him out of his single-mindedness, her mind a wondering nudge against his own.

“Kieren. Kieren,” she says. “Look.”

Blue focuses its lenses obligingly, and there, rising in the distance --

Land.

They get nearer, and Amy’s voice is in two neat pieces, barely hinged together in the middle. “Kieren. Trees.”

And so there are.

Mountains, grey-backed and wearing their ice-white crowns -- and below them, evergreen trees pooled in the foothills, like the mountains themselves are creatures rising slowly from the mossy green waters. Beyond them, sunlight turns the sea a dark, salty blue, and the beauty of it stops them both.

Neither of them have seen a tree in person for almost six months -- and Kieren even longer than that.

It’s the kind of beautiful that hurts to look at, and the joy of beholding it feels like sunlight in Lamon Bay; a heavy, crystalline thing that forms inside their chests, making it difficult to breathe around.

“Oh,” exhales Amy, very quietly.

They head for the trees as inexorably as a kaiju would make for land, and the sea gives way to the shoal underneath them, dry silt scraping at Blue’s belly. Eventually, they’re forced to put their legs down.

“Out of the primordial soup we go,” Amy murmurs. “We’re like the ancestors of man here. We’re the first of the species! Kieren, look, it’s evolution in progress!”

“Amy,” Kieren tries, but the feeling is contagious. They’re the first _something,_ all right.

Water cascades off Blue’s belly when they stand up straight. 

They breach the shore, one step at a time.

 

*

 

Down below, near microscopic against the vastness and remoteness of the Alaskan terrain, a man named Hutch leaves the shelter of his driveway, and knows at once that he hasn’t put on enough layers.

It’s too late to go back, of course -- he’s outside and his house is behind him, ten yards up the driveway where there’s a sturdier pair of boots and a wool sweater he can pull on so he doesn’t have to feel his arms prickling with goosebumps the entire walk. It’s much too late. He’s too far to go back. So he resigns himself to numb toes, scrunches his head down near his shoulders in a surly way, and sets off.

Hutch lives in the middle of what isn’t so much a town as it is a collection of houses with a road that tentatively pokes through it in the manner of one who’d gotten lost but doesn’t want to admit it. His postal address places him in Kodiak, never mind that they’re nowhere near Kodiak Island, but are, in fact, across the channel from it. It had been wartime when he moved here, and there hadn’t been time, then, to get a township established. At best, in its most basic definition, he lives in a suburb.

There’s only one postbox, and this is where Hutch makes his trek, wet April snow dampening through the toes of his inadequate shoes.

From here, the island is a visible mote lazing on top of the water. He doesn’t have to see the spread of the Jaeger Academy to know it’s there.

“Bah,” he says, which doesn’t do anything except alert his teeth and his throat just how cold it is.

There’d been days, he remembers, where you couldn’t _think,_ the noise was so loud: jaegers in the water, jaegers stomping on the proving grounds. Footsteps and bodies falling made the house quake. Hutch could tell you the whole story of the Kaiju War with bits of broken crockery; his mugs were forever shivering themselves off the counters, where there wasn’t any room for them anyway because he’s the kind of man who never throws out any document in case he needs it.

Because he’s thinking about it, of course, he feels it; the ground rumbles beneath his feet. 

Jaeger ghosts. He hears it at night sometimes, too, the chopping of helicopter blades and the blare of a klaxon horn.

He holds the manilla envelope close to his chest, paper crinkling, and allows himself that moment of nostalgia, before he checks it to make sure it’ll be postmarked today. Taxes are due, and who knows how long it’ll take the post to make its way out of Alaska.

Tax season is where Hutch excels; he’s gotten very good at squeezing every last penny out of his government. Serves them right, coming out here to build their giants.

When people came to Kodiak to work for the Jaeger Program, Hutch’s not-a-town formed and swelled, new housing cropping up in every nook and cranny on the island before stretching to the shore across from it. It all still stands, economical and stainless and empty. The ferry dock weathers and droops, unused. There aren’t any jaegers at the Jaeger Academy anymore, and so the beating heart that had sustained the not-a-town trickled and thinned, anemic. Hutch’s income this year was nearly nonexistent -- there weren’t many pennies at all for him to pinch from the suits in Washington.

The ground shivers again. It barely even registers. Hutch is thinking about the jaegers, and so his body remembers.

It’s like with anything else. Ghosts don’t haunt your home, they haunt your skin, your muscle, and its memory.

But the noise keeps approaching. Nearby, a tree drops all its snow like a waitress startled into upending her tray, and Hutch blinks, and stops, and becomes aware.

Giants stomp, and everything rumbles.

He looks up.

A jaeger appears over the tops of the trees.

Hutch’s whole body freezes in place. His toes forget their numbness, and the ears of his cap flap uselessly against his head. His hands clutch dumbly at his tax documents.

Shifting his grip, he lifts a fist to his eyes and gives them a scrub, letting himself think, tiredly, that all he wanted to do was get to the postbox, and then it materializes through a gap in the trees, and Hutch has no room in his brain to think of anything else.

It walks straight down the road in a manner that can really only be described as considerate. It even keeps to its lane.

Which is also Hutch’s lane.

It’s a squat, gollum-like thing, like some English cave troll from a storybook: stocky, brutish body that swings from side to side, weighted into motion by its enormous arms. Its legs are short and paddling compared to the rest of its body, like the kind on the wind-up toys Hutch and his brothers found in their stockings at Christmas -- little frogs that jerkily walked their legs up and down over each other.

As short as they might be, these legs pass their lumpy body far, far over Hutch’s head without any danger of contact.

In the moment that frames it directly overhead, blocking out the sun, the world is nothing but the blink of shade and the wail of machinery, hydraulics hissing like a broody kaiju, the ground a startled leap under his feet with the _boom_ of a heavy footfall.

Hutch opens his mouth. 

He yells “holy _shit”_ because he feels like he should, because it’s that kind of moment.

It’s no more effective, of course, than if he tried to yell into the face of a storm, and that, somehow, makes it almost joyful.

Another thunderous step, then another, and the jaeger keeps walking, heading down the road that curves towards the sea. Hutch clutches his papers, breathless and not feeling the cold at all, and as he watches, the body swivels 180º while its legs stay straight on course.

There’s no real face, no easy way to tell, but Hutch feels the peculiar sensation of being _seen._

Up comes one of those monstrous arms, and the jaeger waves -- in a strangely awkward human way.

And Hutch, who is strange and awkward and human, too, waves back.

 

*

 

“Did you just wave at that guy?” Amy asks, entertained.

“No,” Kieren lies.

 

*

 

Up the coast they go, keeping land to Kieren’s side and staying out past the breakers, where travel consumes less fuel. He fights to stay awake while Amy sleeps, her head lolling -- in his peripheral, her HUD keeps dipping towards the floor, and then the visceral memory of her dying jolts them both like an electric prod.

They skirt around the edge of the Gulf of Alaska with the sun a pale nickel shape stamped out of the sky, and the closer they get to Anchorage, the more crowded the road becomes: fishing trawlers and submarines, bush planes buzzing overhead.

They make no attempt to hide.

What does a jaeger have to fear from these little things, and the tiny, lonely minds that pilot them?

Blue thinks they’re fascinating. This is Blue’s first exposure to civilians; humans that are not its pilots or its technicians or its builders. It wants to know if they all can sing like the little grey ant does?

“Grey ant?” Kieren and Amy try to shift Blue’s question into context. “Oh, Henry?”

Yes.

“They might. But it’s not all humans do.”

Okay. It likes the singing.

They pass close enough to a squat red sightseeing boat that they can just barely distinguish the shapes that cluster together at the stern, shouting and pointing, and so Blue gives an experimental paddle. The eddy sends the boat bobbing fiercely like a toy in a bathtub, and Blue’s hydraulics hiss with delight.

“Stop,” Kieren and Amy tell it. Whining, it retracts its arm and jets doggedly forward, leaving the boat behind.

The Alaska Shatterdome rises abruptly into view, as boxy and grey as the patchwork pattern of Zoe’s wedding dress, jutting out with all its corners from the green, bowl-shaped landscape. It sits awkwardly in the water like a losing Tetris piece, jammed into place wrong. Like all Shatterdomes, it had been built in a hurry.

Carefully, Blue swims up to the bay doors. They are very big. Much bigger than they need to be.

That is interesting.

Blue is very large, but also small compared to the jaegers of the past. It knows this.

It waits, swaying with the seawater around it, but the doors don’t open. That is odd. Blue doesn’t know what to do about doors that don’t open when you swim up to them.

It asks them what it should do. When they don’t reply, it pushes up against their mindspace and finds it fuzzy, full of static, and it shakes it off like bad electricity. It leaves a sour charge in its head. They are connected and they are offline, both at once.

That is interesting.

Blue considers its options. What do humans do?

Slowly, it lifts their hand, which lifts its hand.

It knocks.

It knocks.

It knocks again.

It keeps knocking until -- until --

The bay doors open.

 

*

 

Without warning, Blue and Amy are gone from his head. They are at the end of his every thought, and suddenly, they’re not.

“Pilot-to-pilot connection disengaged,” a voice says, and Kieren opens his mouth, because this is pain, isn’t it? This is pain, this aloneness? This is _pain._

This is --

He blacks out.

 

*

 

He doesn’t know how long he sleeps.

It’s not restful. He sleeps and wakes and falls, and there in the down below there are hallucinations to send him screamingly awake again, coming hard and fast and one right after the other:

Rick sewn together in jagged pieces, limping. He wears the uniform of a PPDC officer.

Bill Macy with blood on his hands.

Jem in front of the mirror, older even than he saw her in the drift, pulling her hair out from under the collar of her coat. A gun sits holstered at her hip, a bandolier of rounds slung across her chest, and smiling frogs look up at her from her socks.

He and Amy, hunched down like kaiju-creatures, picking bits of Dr Geiszler’s brain out of his skull and feeding each other like it’s wedding cake, her fingers slick and worshipful on his lips.

Simon in full ceremonial dress, his throat painted from chin to collar in the traditional way -- the color is a bright, toxic blue. Laid out in front of him like scripture are several instruments, wrapped in oilcloth. His fingers skip over a bonecutter’s knife and settle on a pair of wire cutters, which he lifts to the light. All down the back of his robes, the embroidered Spinejackal curls its lips back over its wicked teeth -- and then looks right at him.

He freezes in place, but it’s too late --

The roving eye of a kaiju is turning, turning, turned on him turned on _him_

he is _seen_

HE IS SEEN HE

CANNOT BE UNSEEN

HE IS

\-- and suddenly, like a switch flicked, he is hundreds of feet into the air.

Icebergs mob each other in the cold grey of the Bering Sea, and the kaiju cuts soundlessly below them, a terrible nightmare creature with two faces and great webbed fins and spines cresting its back. It’s an unknown: Earth has not seen this particular kaiju before. Human tongues have not given it a name.

He watches from above as it swims inexorably close to the Wall, rising slow and serpentine out of the water. One face turns upward, studying the obstacle, and the other faces out, and it sees Kieren in his omniscient position and Kieren sees it and recognizes it in the way that all kaiju recognize another.

It wants the Wall and it will climb it.

Except --

Except --

Except there are Zombies at the top the Wall, waiting. Feral Zombies with black mouths, humming out of blue throats. It’s not the painted blue of the Buenakai; their throats are vibrant and glowing. They dot the whole length of the Wall like barbed wire on a fence, holding themselves suspended out over the sea and the ice and the monster waiting below.

The kaiju looks up at them, two-faced and blue-eyed.

And they stare down at it, blue-eyed and many.

The Wall vibrates with the force of the sound they’re making; the low, threatening hum.

And as far as K-science or its priests know, the kaiju don’t have a language, but the message coming out of their throats is clear: _this is ours._

_This is ours and you cannot have it._

And slowly --

Slowly, the kaiju folds its spines and begins to hum back.

 

*

 

At one point, he wakes to find himself in the familiar tube of a hyperbaric chamber. The lights at his sides are dim, colored a pale shade of purple, and Kieren remembers all the times he wished the drive suits’ HUD was this color instead of kaiju-blue, and nearly smiles to himself.

The next thing he knows, he’s waking up again, this time in a cot with Amy pressed against his side.

She lifts her head, awake in the same moment, and they look at each other.

The crystalline look on her face, fierce and sharp, eases into relief.

She leans forward, kissing his chin. “ _You’re real. I didn’t know if you were real. I thought I’d made you up inside my head,”_ she says, and he can’t see her mouth, so he doesn’t know if she said it out loud or in his head or both.

He shakes his head. 

_No. We died. We died and Blue didn’t want to live in the world without us so it came into the drift and it called our loved ones and they brought us back._

She smiles.

Their worlds extend to the other and no further. They’re a fright to look at, grey down to the bone, their scalps burned and their mouths covered in sores and smeared, strangely, like someone had tried to wipe it away in a perfunctory way, in a black that’s almost red. Not the blue-black of Zombie blood, but human red, like they’ve been eating it, like --

Inside his mouth, Kieren can feel the hard ridges where the polyps burst. There’s a fantastic ache in his spine, in his right side -- he doesn’t want to see that damage. He doesn’t want to know what piloting Blue alone has done to him.

Amy tilts her eyebrows at him. _Are we hideous now?_

Kieren shrugs. _We were dead. We’re pretty sprightly for somebody who was dead and then wasn’t anymore._

She smiles. Her eyelids droop and she burrows under his arm.

He presses their heads together like Mori and Beckett and they sleep.

 

*

 

The next he wakes, somebody’s cursing.

The room is a Shatterdome room, industrial and impersonal, and the darkness means nothing to Kieren’s eyes, so he sees the layer of dust that touches everything but themselves and the sheets. After the end of the war, with no more jaegers and no more kaiju, the Shatterdomes were about as useful as Olympic stadiums. Some got repurposed, but not all.

A man sits in the corner, straddling a chair backwards and thumbing at a handheld device, which illuminates the silver at his temples and the goatee clinging feebly to his chin. He jolts and curses again, tapping faster -- Kieren thinks he must be playing a game. 

He closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, the light has changed and so has the man’s location. The chair’s tipped back against the far wall now, his ankles thrown over each other on the desk. His socks match his tie and the sight makes Kieren want to smile, and he opens his mouth. His “hello” is a kaiju-colored rasp.

The man straightens abruptly, feet hitting the floor.

“Mr Walker,” he says. “Ms Dyer.”

Kieren and Amy sit up in unison.

The handheld hits the desk top, and the man continues, in English, “You’re in the Alaska Shatterdome. There are a lot of questions we want to ask you, when you’re ready. But first, do you … erm, do you need anything? Do you eat, or --”

“Anti-kaiju meds --” says Kieren.

“We don’t eat,” Amy says simultaneously.

“-- and I think I need my mouth filed down --”

“-- do you have any clothes that aren’t grey?” She blinks, and frowns sidelong at Kieren. “No, you don’t. They already burst. You fought it off.”

“I’m not sure that’s scientifically --“

“You’re not a threat.”

“… Right,” the man says slowly. “I’ll just --“

As he stands, Amy blurts out, “Who controls the rig now? Have you reported us? Are you sending us back there -- are we prisoners?”

The battery of questions is rapid-fire, and his eyebrows shoot up. Upright, Kieren can see that he’s got a name stitched onto the breast of his coat: Choi.

 _Oh,_ he thinks.

“The Aleutian rig, we’re from the labour camp at the Aleutian rig,” Amy elaborates, and Kieren leans on her hand before she can say anything else.

“Ah.” Choi shunts his jaw to the side and sucks at the inside of his cheek. “Unfortunately, there’s been no communication with the Aleutian. A blackout’s in effect.”

The inside of Kieren’s mouth turns wintry.

Amy’s thumb catches over the meat of his hand, and it’s a static shock, the jolt of _Simon!_ that goes through both their heads.

“Is everybody okay?” they ask in unison.

He holds up his hands. He wears a wedding ring, a rosary around his wrist, and a cheap black watch like the kind you can find by the check-out at Tesco’s. “I don’t know, everybody’s out of the loop with everyone else,” he says. “I’ll get you updates as I’m made aware of them. The name’s Choi, I’m a J-Tech Chief out of Hong Kong.”

“We know who you are,” Amy says dryly.

They all shake on it, and he shows teeth. “Imagine my surprise when I get a call in the middle of the night, ‘you wanna get your ass out here for this, Choi, there’s a jaeger that just waltzed into the Alaska Shatterdome.’ Wife wasn’t too pleased,” the grin turns rueful. “She builds bombs for a living, you know, I try not to piss her off.”

He picks up the tablet off the desk.

“Also, is there … anybody I can contact for you to let them know you’re all right?”

Kieren and Amy look at him blankly. He just said the rig was unreachable, didn’t he?

It clicks with Kieren first.

“Oh,” he says, softly, because there are places outside of the Bering Sea and the people they love there. “We have -- we have family in England. They --“

He stops, working around the arid patch in his throat, the tight twisting coil in his stomach, something that manages to be both hope and dread at the same time. He hasn’t spoken to or heard from them in almost four years. Jem told him herself: she’d be nineteen now.

Choi waits, and then prompts, “Is there a number I can reach them at?”

And Kieren deals with the strange sensation of trying to remember his home phone number accurately enough to give it to someone else.

After, Choi turns to Amy, fingers poised expectantly over his tablet.

Again, it takes a moment.

“Oh!” says Kieren, startled. “No, it’s my family,” and the pronoun sticks strangely in his mouth, the idea that he has something Amy doesn’t: she has gravestones where he has parents, and when she contracted the blues, her grandmother already had a terminal diagnosis. There wasn’t likely to be anyone left alive. “You’ll be asking for the Walkers.”

“Gotcha,” says Choi. “And again -- pilots, when you’re ready,” he nods at them.

Kieren darts a look at Amy and finds her looking back, her eyes enormous. Even with everything else, this moment cuts brightly through it: Tendo Choi, J-Tech Chief, is nodding his head to them in respect! _Them!_

He smiles. “Welcome to the Shatterdome.”

 

*

 

A balled-up piece of paper hits her in the back of the head just as Mr Turner says, “Does anyone know where the term ‘Zombie’ came from?”

Up shoots a helpful hand a few rows in front, and she fires a scowl over her shoulder before bending sideways to fetch the paper from where it bounced to the floor.

Mr Turner glances around for any hands that are not the one in the air, and then prompts them, “Anyone _besides_ Josie?”

_You up for tonight?_

_Yes,_ she writes back without hesitation, and then taps the end of her biro against her desktop as she thinks. She starts to write, _if the roads aren’t flooded,_ and then crosses it out, because she doesn’t think that’s likely to stop them. Instead, she writes, _Do we got enough? Old Nan Dyer says there are two new ones._

She puts the biro down and starts to ball up the paper when Mr Turner says, “Jem?”

She looks up. “Yeah.”

The class titters, and Jem sets her jaw, focusing on the teacher and the whiteboard behind him and not on the little oval faces in her peripheral, all sneaking looks at her over their shoulders. Everybody likes seeing somebody _else_ get caught not paying attention, and everybody likes seeing _Jem_ get caught, because she’s two years older than the rest of them and while Jem doesn’t feel any different from them because she’s already been their age, they haven’t been _her_ age yet and that makes her unfathomable. They make sure she doesn’t forget it.

“What’s the question?” she’s forced to ask.

The tittering grows louder.

Behind her, she hears a scuffle that has to be Lisa kicking somebody.

“How did Zombies get their name?”

Jem shifts in her seat, rallying her thoughts, and she can see the exact moment Mr Turner remembers who he’s talking to, because his face gets that particularly keen expression of someone who regrets every decision that led them to this point.

Before he can do something horrible and pitying like say, _You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,_ Jem opens her mouth.

“It was the first feral case, weren’t it? In the city-cemeteries?” She knows she’s got the right answer even before he gives her an encouraging nod. “Feral Zombies were the first to poison their victims with Kaiju Blue when they bite, so everybody just figured -- here were these people who were _clearly_ sick with something, half-dead, and you’d see them coming out of graveyard -- or, rather, parts of the cities that had been destroyed by kaiju where nobody could safely live, and they attacked and killed with a bite and couldn’t be stopped by bullets. So,” she gestures. “Like, zombies.”

“And which city-cemetery was this, Jem?”

“One of the ones on the Pacific Rim,” Jem answers promptly, and this time when the class laughs, it isn’t _at_ her.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” Mr Turner says dryly. He turns back around to face the whiteboard, the marker cap squeaking as it comes off, and Jem takes advantage of his turned back to quickly wad up the paper and pitch it over the heads of the people sitting behind her, hoping to catch Lisa off guard.

But Lisa sticks her hand up and catches it almost lazily.

If there’s one person in the world with better aim than Jem Walker, it might be Lisa Lancaster.

“All right,” Mr Turner faces them again. “We’ll get back to the feral ones in a moment. Can anyone tell me what country saw the _first_ case of somebody surviving exposure to the Kaiju Blue?”

Several people chorus at once, “We did!”

“Right you are. Happened just a few miles south of here, in fact.” Circling around the perimeter of the room, he crosses under the framed portraits of Stacker and Luna Pentecost, each in their respective uniforms. “A few down-on-their-luck individuals decided to go for a swim in a quarantined reservoir. Five went in, and one of them came back out again.”

The wadded-up bit of paper hits the back of her boot.

_Charlotte got us another pack. Two crates, 24 each. Do you want a ride?_

_Ta,_ Jem scribbles back, and waits for an opening to toss the paper back. Usually she would just message her, but Lisa almost always gets her phone confiscated before fourth period, so they have to be all Neanderthal about it.

She doesn’t need to be told about the first person in the world who caught the blues. Dorothy Dyer’s granddaughter was moving back home after a bad break-up when she met some people and -- supposedly -- they all decided that, if they were going to end it, they might as well make a day-trip out of it; set up a bonfire and get a few pints and see what all this fuss about the Kaiju Blue was about. Nobody knows which of those five was the one who survived as a Zombie -- literally nobody, it’s becoming a bit of a _thing._ The Buenakai are trying to find the first person who turned, thinking they’re the holiest of the holy or whatever, and K-science is trying to find them faster, thinking they’ve got the key to surviving the Kaiju Blue in their blood.

Jem feels sorry for that sad bastard, whoever they are.

And Old Nan Dyer point-black refuses to die until she learns whether or not it was her granddaughter.

Amy.

So she recruited people like Charlotte Briggs and Jem Walker, who were searching for their own Zombie relatives, and Jem’s best friend Lisa, to help her look. And that’s how they found the unregistered Zombies hiding up in Bowland.

“When they realized that more and more people were catching the blues, how long was it before a medication was patented?”

A hand shoots up.

“Nine months.”

“Correct! Now, in its first incarnation, anti-kaiju meds were to be taken by healthy people, though it wasn’t any different than any of the scams going around during the War. I’m hoping everybody in this room had parents who were too smart to fall for that,” he laughs, and a few of them laugh obediently back. 

“Bet Jem remembers that,” pipes up some bloke from the row in front. “She’s old enough for it!”

“That’s enough, Billy,” says Mr Turner, and a beat after he turns his back, Jem unpins a safety pin from the outside of her bag, works it off, and hurtles it at the side of Billy’s head. He hisses and claps a hand to his ear, expression turning peevish.

“The first anti-kaiju meds were just a placebo, meant more to calm people than it was to treat them for anything except maybe a mild temperature. As far as scams went, though, it made enough money to pave the way for the _real_ medicine: the kind that kept Zombies from going feral in the first place. However!”

He pauses, once more framed between the two portraits of the Pentecost siblings.

“Those who’d retreated from society were hard to reach and thus still posed a threat to civilians, so the PPDC set up the …” He trails off expectantly.

“The Approbation Reward System!”

“For their own safety,” Mr Turner finishes. 

Jem ducks her head, and her bangs fall into her eyes. They’re too long, really, to be called bangs anymore, but they aren’t quite long enough to stay tucked into her ponytail.

She read somewhere about certain indigenous tribes in Canada where you couldn’t cut your hair while your parents were alive, not unless you wanted them to know you wanted them dead. You’d only cut your hair after you buried them both. Jem wonders if you could do the same thing for lost brothers -- it was one of the last things they’d done together before he got taken, dyeing her hair red. She wouldn’t cut it, wouldn’t dye it again, wouldn’t even touch up the color, not until he came home or they got the news that he died. 

It looks terrible: more bottle orange now than red, the bleached ends cracked and frizzy, her roots grown down around her chin.

In the morning, Jem pulls it back and paints her nails to match, and she puts on her boots and her brother’s coat.

And she fucking goes to war.

“So, what two factors do you think were at play in making sure that 2032 saw the fewest recorded cases of feral Zombies yet?”

 _Anti-kaiju meds and the diligence of the everyday citizen who turned in their neighbors for the price of tea in China,_ Jem thinks bitterly.

“Correct,” says Mr Turner to the person who gives the polite version of that answer. “So, the name ‘Zombie’ has become quite the misnomer, don’t you think?”

Jem’s hand goes to her neck, tracing her lanyard and turning over its contents between her fingers: housekey, ration card, ID chip -- each with its own groove rubbed in them by her thumb. 

In the Pacific nations, she’s heard that they get their ID chips embedded under the wrist to prevent fraud and chip-swapping, but things aren’t as strict in other places. (“It’s a bloody invasion of my bodily autonomy, that’s what it is!” Pearl Pinder declared, and that was the end of that.) Bill Macy takes his wife’s ID chip all the time, since she’s the only credible one left in that family. Jem’s used her dad’s ID chip twice now to authorize things, but only minor things -- licensing and the like -- when her mum and dad are too busy with work to get to the clerk’s office.

She glances down, tracing her ID chip’s anatomy with the edge of her thumb, and wonders on which part it’s written that she’s a felon.

That she did time for assault with a deadly weapon.

When the magistrate declared that they’d be sending her to the crown courts to try her an adult -- even though she’d only just turned sixteen -- he’d been kindly about it. She was at the age, he proclaimed, where we all act unreasonably in the face of perfectly rational circumstances. How he felt that her “responsibility” for Gary’s injury would be punishment enough, but that ultimately a jury would decide, and how she’d surely think before overreacting next time.

Those words have stuck with Jem the way few other things do. Even in her memory, the condescension still _drips_ from them, and touching it with her mind is like striking phosphorus with a match.

Overreacting? _Overreacting?_

Overreacting to Gary and his goons _bursting_ into her house, without permission, without even knocking, and taking her brother away so they’d have more money for -- for _whatever_ it is they thought was more valuable?

_Injury._

What fucking injury? So Jem stuck a knife through his eye, what the _fuck_ ever, he wears a patch and milks it when he wants to pull somebody at the Legion, that hardly looks like an injury to her.

(In staircase wit, Jem tells that magistrate that she doesn’t think she got an equal value exchange. Gary stole her childhood co-pilot from her, and if this is a business transaction, then _reasonably,_ wouldn’t that mean she got to take something of equal value? All she took from him was an eye.)

And what of _their_ injury?

What of the empty chair at the Walkers’ dinner table? What of Jem’s stalled academics, her limited prospects, the bedroom door next to hers that stays locked? What about how they have to live with Shroedinger’s brother, alive and dead simultaneously, and with only the PPDC knowing which was which but being too “busy” to account for it?

She pulls her hair down further around her face. She’s in serious danger of crying.

She’s about to stand up and ask to be excused, the inevitable pity she’d get from the administration be damned, but --

Josie pipes up first.

“That’s bullshit. Those numbers are skewed,” she says, without even putting her hand up first, which is uncharacteristic for Josie. “‘Cos en’t nobody that _records_ feral cases anymore, yeah?”

Mr Turner blinks at her. “How do you figure?”

“Well, after they catch Zombies, they put ‘em up on the Wall, don’t they? Or wherever the hardest work is that needs-be-done. Calling ‘em labour camps. And it’s much easier to record a fall off the Wall than it is to deal with reporting a feral case, innit?” she glances around, looking for somebody to back her up.

Jem unclenches her fists.

On the wall, the Pentecosts look stern. Below them, Mr Turner just looks nonplussed. 

“I don’t know know where you’re getting that information from.”

“It’s on the internet, then. From that camp in Alaska that got overrun. All that information hit the web like a shitstorm. You en’t heard about it?”

“Oh, well, if it’s on the Internet,” he drawls. “Then it must be true.”

“I’m telling you -- there’s no reason for it not to be, it’s --”

A knock on the glass in the classroom door interrupts her, and anger flares up through Jem’s sternum -- _no,_ what are they _thinking,_ she needs to hear the rest of this! A labour camp in Alaska got overrun?

A teacher from down the hall leans in to speak to Mr Turner, who has the door cracked open for her, and Jem contemplates if she can get away with leaping out of her chair and grabbing Josie by the arm.

She’s just planted her feet when Mr Turner turns around and says, “Jem?”

She looks up. “Yeah?”

“Headmaster wants to see you.”

She glances from Mr Turner’s face to the other teacher’s. “Why?”

“Didn’t say, love,” the teacher tells her, and Jem can tell from her voice that it’s a lie. “Just that it’s important.”

Slowly, Jem stands. She pulls her messenger bag up and slings it around her neck so it cuts crosswise on her chest like a bandolier. All the safety pins on its flap rustle together, and she slips her hand underneath. Her fingertips touch the spine of her book, her folder for the next class, an apple, two boxes of light bulbs she nicked from the custodial closet that they’re taking to the Zombie enclave in Bowland later (along with the two crates of anti-kaiju meds that Charlotte got.) They settle around the hilt of her pocketknife.

She glances back at Lisa, who frowns at her. 

Through the crack in the door, she hears a radio crackle to life in the hallway.

Nobody at the school carries a radio, and just like that, Jem knows.

 

*

 

It takes Kieren and Amy two days to find an escape.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration.

It takes them two days to catch up on their sleep debt.

Choi comes in to ask questions, and when he’s not there, they sleep until they no longer need to sleep anymore. Once, memorably, they open their eyes to find that someone’s brought them clean underwear, a couple shirts in schoolyard primary colors, a blouse the color of salmon, jeans, and a brown hooded jacket, which they fall on with the same single-minded delight that inmates on the rig fell on their food. 

“Jesus, I feel human,” Amy breathes out, smoothing her hands down the blouse and then framing her hips in the jeans. “I’m in _color,_ Kieren!”

“Maybe you could ask them for a skirt next,” he suggests. “If anyone has one to spare.”

“The uniform’s got a skirt version. Theirs, I mean,” she jerks her chin. “But it’s just knee-length and the world isn’t ready for my bare legs. Oi, _cheeky!”_ she adds, scandalized, correctly reading the _I’ve seen them and I’m not impressed_ gesture he makes.

Escaping, it turns out, is just as easy as spinning the hatch on the door. It doesn’t need a special code or permission from their ID chips to open.

They leave their boots off so that they don’t make a sound, but it doesn’t matter. 

The Alaska Shatterdome is a ghost town.

Really, the only reason anybody’s here at all is probably because of them, and that makes for a skeletal crew who are easy to avoid.

There are a couple doors they can’t get through -- LOCCENT, where all outside communication hubs from, and weapons development, and the door to the docks with the speedboats that would take them to Anchorage proper. They _can_ get out onto the helipad, which is useless because neither of them could pilot a helicopter even if they wanted to. 

“You know,” Kieren stands at the edge of the helipad and looks down. “If we were Mori or Beckett, this wouldn’t stop them.”

“We’re not, though,” she replies. “And besides, we can’t leave Blue.”

And for two people who haven’t been outside of a labour camp in years, there’s a lot to see, regardless.

It reminds Kieren of that story he heard from one of the Alaskan inmates, about an elderly woman from the north who got lost during a snowstorm and was found wandering close to Nome two days later, delirious and starving. They brought her home and she ate everything in sight, all at once, and died that night, safe in her bed. After her ordeal, her body couldn’t handle the excess.

This feels a lot like that -- Kieren and Amy have lived without freedom for so long they have to edge towards it in small increments, untrusting. Too much feels like poison.

“Did I ever tell you,” Choi says to them as he walks them past the empty jaeger bays. “That I was in San Francisco on K-Day?”

Kieren and Amy exchange a look.

Her mouth twitches, and Kieren finishes her thought, “I was five months old.”

Choi claps a hand to his chest. “Oh, deep-fat-fried Jesus Christ, don’t tell me that! You’re that young?”

They shrug, and can’t help but grin as Choi shades his face and makes a distressed noise.

“Well,” he says, rallying valiantly. “I was _not_ five months old, let’s put it that way. I was -- well, I remember Trespasser. I saw it with my own eyes. I was working on the docks for summer cash and it came up out of the bay, like --“ he starts to gesture, and then stops. “Well, it was still San Francisco Bay then, but I suppose you’d only know it as Oblivion Bay. It was -- you know, I’ve categorized and named almost every kaiju that’s come out of the breach, but I’m not going to forget that sucker. Category 1, and that’s barely nothing, more like the yappy chihuahua version of a Category IV, and I still wake up like …”

He trails off.

Amy frowns at him. “What happened?”

Through the course of the conversation, she’s leaned all up along Kieren’s side, pressing them together shoulder to hip to thigh. He has to nudge her to get her to step apart, to remember that the left side of her body is not him.

“We evacuated,” Choi explains. “They were hitting Trespasser with missiles then, hadn’t gone nuclear yet, and all of us on foot traffic were getting splattered with bits of Kaiju Blue. I don’t know how you contracted the blues, but I’m going to guess it wasn’t with the fresh stuff. Oily, nasty, smells like rotten fish, never comes out.”

Amy glances sidelong at Kieren, who resists the urge to touch his mouth.

“I still had my rain slicker on, so I was fine, but my grandfather -- he wasn’t.”

A long silence follows this, filled only with the slow creaking of the Shatterdome around then, the drafty winds in the empty bays.

Kieren and Amy watch Choi’s profile, warily waiting for any sign of resentment, but when he looks over, the look on his face is mild, peaceable, a little sad in the corners.

He holds up his hands. “I’m not going to lie, I’m glad there are people who survive it. I’m glad it’s no longer the death sentence that it was. I don’t want anyone to have to go through what I went through.”

 _Don’t say it,_ Kieren thinks at Amy, but it’s too late.

She stops walking.

“They do, though,” she says flatly, staring at Choi. “That’s _exactly_ what happens. As soon as we’re diagnosed -- _before_ that, even, you don’t even have to have _proof,_ you can just turn a neighbor in on suspicion alone -- we’re ripped from our families. We’re stuck in uniforms and sent to labour camps to work off our ‘debt.’ How is that _not_ a death sentence?”

“I …” Choi tries.

“Did you know there are children on our rig? Taken from their families and turned into child labourers.”

“That can’t be right.”

Amy experiences a flash of anger so intense that it whites out Kieren’s vision momentarily.

“That’s the PPDC,” she fires. “You send sixteen-year-olds up the Wall to die and we aren’t even surprised. That’s what the PPDC is to us, what you’ve _become --”_

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Kieren steps in, and the steel in his own voice surprises him. It surprises Amy, too; her head twists around in his peripheral. “And I’m sorry, it’s nice to hear, but your magnanimity isn’t much use to us.”

Choi makes a gesture with his head like, _yeah, all right._ “What would be?”

“Get us in touch with the Aleutian,” Amy tells him, hard. “If you can’t help, then help _us_ so we can help ourselves.”

“… the labourers,” he finishes. He sticks his hands in his pockets, regarding them with his brows pinched. “You’re talking about the labourers. Like, maybe I understand wantin’ to stick up for the Zombies, and -- and the kids, yeah, but you’re talking felons, too. Nasty folk. And you -- nothing like you has ever existed before -- you could ask for _anything,_ and you ask us for mercy for a bunch of wall-crawlers?”

He knows he’s gone too far a second before they do, and is already holding up his hand when Amy puffs herself up like she’s got spines.

“You’re right, you’re right,” he cuts in over her. “That was uncalled for. I’m Jaeger Programme, see, I’m always gonna be a little -- _ehh_ about the Wall of Life. I’m just -- the Aleutian is tiny. You’re in a Shatterdome, you have a functioning jaeger that was built with scrap parts and _functions,_ and -- I swear, this is the fishing trawler thing all over again, are you sure you don’t know the Beckett boys? -- and with the readings we’re getting from the Bering Sea, I’m not seeing how they’re a priority.”

He stops, then, because Amy is suddenly in his face, salmon-colored blouse and soft jeans and blue, blue, kaiju-colored eyes.

“And that,” she says, jabbing a finger into his chest. “Is why you have a problem.”

 

*

 

The jaeger bays all sit in a honeycomb shape around the supervision of LOCCENT’s glass-walled hub, all of them empty, their jaegers sunk and entombed in foreign seas. Redeemer Blue sits in the last of these, an uncomfortable fit for a bay designed specifically for Mark IIIs and IVs. Its arms, by necessity, are suspended far above where the rest of its body sits.

Without them in it, it’s just a large droid, but Kieren and Amy climb up onto the catwalk and then onto Blue’s head from there. They find a spot to sit above the cockpit, half-cradled between those giant hands. There’s diagnostic equipment everywhere, and they watch the figures in LOCCENT overhead pace back and forth, talking into their headsets and grumbling into their coffee mugs. It’s really no different from watching Phil and his administrators behind the observation glass.

“Hey, Blue,” Amy says, splaying her hand out across the glass bubble that protects Blue’s sensors.

Kieren puts his hands next to hers. “We wanted to say thank you for seeing us safely out of the sea.”

There’s an almost-space in their heads that they reach for in the same moment, and Amy looks at Kieren and Kieren looks at Amy and they feel it at once: a spark, there between their minds in the place that has always been Blue’s. Amy’s eyes widen fractionally.

Underneath the glass, a single lens turns on them, focusing on the shape of their palms.

Amy draws in a sharp breath.

“Hi, Blue,” Kieren murmurs, and the lens whirs again, and then is still.

“Has that ever happened before?” Amy asks, whispering, like there’s anybody else around to hear them.

Ghost drifting they’re familiar with; that feeling after they’ve broken a neural handshake, like it’s still there, like they’re climbing the not-a-Kwoon structure and feeling each other’s vibrations, blindfolded. It shouldn’t be surprising that they’ll have an usually intense case of it, not after what happened during their last dive.

But this is … not like that.

This is knowing what Amy’s looking at before he turns around. This is feeling her sentences come together in his head. This is Blue swimming itself right up to the bay doors of the Alaska Shatterdome and politely knocking, both of its pilots unconscious. This is Blue responding to them even when there’s no PONs system connecting them.

It’s the hallucinations; Gipsy Danger detonating, the familiarity of the nameless kaiju swimming up to the Wall, the Zombies with their throats glowing.

“It’s like we’ve got a hive mind starting,” Amy shows teeth.

Kieren swallows. He opens his mouth, and knows without looking in a mirror -- why would he need to, she’s right across from him -- that the inside of it is still feral-blue, Otachi-colored. “Don’t joke,” he says. “I don’t want kaiju in my head.”

“Sorry.”

They sit there, framed by Blue’s raised arms with the smell of seawater in their noses, until a klaxon begins to sound in another part of the Shatterdome, echoing through the vast open space of the bays. Movement in LOCCENT speeds up, like drone insects disturbed inside a hive.

Kieren glances sidelong at Amy. Should they investigate?

She looks back. Wordlessly, they both stand and leap from Blue’s head with a labourer’s fearlessness, swinging themselves up onto the catwalk. Easily, they criss-cross the movable walkways until they reach one of the doors leading out of Blue’s bay.

Industrial war machine that it is, the Alaska Shatterdome has hallways that all look the same, but it’s a lot harder than you’d think to get lost, since all roads will eventually lead back to one place: the honeycomb, with LOCCENT sitting in the middle. The commotion’s coming from the helipad -- several people with very official-sounding titles have arrived. The overhead PA pipes in with directions, urging the limited personnel to report here or there depending on the needs of the newcomers.

Kieren and Amy linger about curiously, trying to catch a glimpse without actually drawing attention to themselves.

As they wait, a thought strikes him.

“Do you think we’ll meet the Prophet?” he wonders out loud, and she darts a look at him, drawing the brown jacket closer around her. “We’re on his turf.”

Amy considers it. Oliver had told them that his and Nina’s employer, the shady benefactor that orchestrated Redeemer Blue’s construction, was most likely a K-scientist with an idea that the PPDC didn’t want to fund, so he used his and his partner’s personal accounts to recruit a rig like the Aleutian to carry it out in secret. If anything was going to draw him out, it would be this.

“I heard him speak once,” she muses, as they pause outside the chapel.

(“A real one, mind,” Choi had assured them, leading them around on tour. “None of that ‘we worship kaiju shit’ bullcrap. How that even got started …” he’d lifted his shoulder, a helpless half-shrug. “Stupid people need to believe stupid things, I guess. I’ve seen every one of those bastards come slithering up out of the breach, and let me tell you, there’s nothing holy about a lizard that belches and shits and has scale lice, okay.”

He’d glanced over his shoulder, grinning a “am I right or what” kind of grin, and caught the expression on their faces. The discussion ended quickly after that. There are some things you just put your back up about.)

She continues, “I didn’t understand much of what he said -- he used a voice distorter. Like, what, we were going to recognize him? Zombies are completely isolated. We don’t know who _anybody_ is, much less what they sound like.”

“What did he talk about?” Kieren asks.

“I don’t know.” She tilts her head, frowning. The inside of her mouth is blue-tinged. “But I do remember -- he said something about … about how numbers were the closest we could get to the handwriting of God?” She snorts and shakes her head. “Or something like that.”

 

*

 

The first time they see her, there’s still snow caught on the shoulders of her uniform and she wears a red scarf over the front of her jacket like the vestments of a priest, or a rabbi’s taillit.

Choi leads a pack of important-looking people down the hallway, with her absorbed in the heart of it, and Kieren and Amy look up as they pass a T-intersection. The woman with the scarf is the only one who turns her head and spots them.

She falls back, and the group pulls away without her.

Slowing, she comes to a halt in front of the lined-up portraits of Marshal Pentecost and Marshal Hansen. She looks straight at them, keen and piercing, taking them in; two blue-eyed Zombies, shoeless and in civilian clothes. The brass on her uniform shines. The way she’s got her head framed makes her look like she’s another portrait that hasn’t been hung yet.

Kieren watches her watching them and feels a chill go through him.

Later, they catch Choi shoveling down a quick meal in the mess, and Amy asks him, “Who _was_ that?”

“Hmm?” He glances up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It looks like the food they’ve scrounged up around an inactive Shatterdome is all ration fare. Kieren doesn’t envy him. “Oh! That’s Commander Martin.”

 _Oh,_ Kieren thinks. She was the PPDC ambassador they’d canceled the dive for, weeks ago.

“Maxine Martin,” Choi continues admiringly. “Hell of a woman. Invaluable during the war. A diplomat, first and foremost, and you can’t tell me they didn’t go to the mat nearly as hard as the Rangers did. Officers like her kept the Jaeger Program going when the PPA started to lose steam.” He shrugs. “To be honest, I kinda think she wants the kaiju back, because that’s what we were best at -- fighting them.”

“So you think she’ll make an enemy out of us, as the next best thing?”

“Well …” Choi clearly hadn’t considered that; he isn’t used to looking at prejudice against Zombies as an active problem. “I don’t think so? All I know is that she’s a good contender for Marshal whenever Herc decides he’s out.”

This sufficiently derails them, and Amy darts a wide-eyed look at Kieren. Oh, sure, _Herc._ No big deal, that’s just Hercules Hansen. It’s not like Delilah carried Striker Eureka’s emblem on her keychain for the better part of her adolescence, until all the paint on the bulldog’s face had completely chipped away. It’s not like Kieren and Jem, then aged seven and five, solemnly ended a month-long feud by agreeing -- with a child’s easy disregard for age differences, circumstance, celebrity, and legality -- that they would _both_ marry Chuck Hansen, and they would trade him off each day the same way they did the Tacit Ronan figure Mum insisted they share. (Chuck would, of course, be allowed to have Sundays off. It seemed fair.)

“Right,” Amy says squeakily.

They skulk around for the rest of the evening, but no opportunities present themselves, and they’re fast asleep when Choi suddenly comes barging into their room.

“Hey, Rangers!” he barks, the automated lighting coming on with his entrance. His skinny tie flaps against his front. “I’ve got news for you ‘bout the Aleutian.”

He doesn’t wait for them to finish blinking groggily at him before he barrels on. 

“Your inmates now successfully control the rig, and -- _woah.”_

He stops, alarmed at the speed with which they bolt upright.

“Who did you talk to?” they ask.

“Nobody, I just saw Commander Martin communicating with them in LOCCENT.”

“Who did you see?” Kieren demands.

“Was it a man?” Amy wants to know.

“Big shoulders?”

“Bad haircut?”

Choi’s eyes volley back and forth between them.

“Er,” he tries. “No? Um. White guy. Big ears?”

He demonstrates, and Kieren and Amy say “Oh,” and sink backwards disappointedly. “That’s Phil. He’s not an inmate.”

“Well.” Choi still seems a little nonplussed. “Whatever he is, he’s the one they’ve elected to appeal on their behalf. You’d be proud -- from what I saw, he’s doing a very good job. Commander Martin called him a traitor twice, and I was only standing behind her for a few minutes. She doesn’t do that for just anyone.”

Kieren remembers Simon, saying, _We want you to be our ambassadors. The PPDC won’t negotiate with kaiju-creatures or prisoners, but they might negotiate with the pilots of the world’s only existing jaeger._

In their absence, Phil must have been the next best bet.

He’s surprised -- Phil? Spineless Phil, the foreman’s fetch-and-carry? Phil, who can’t get his act together in front of a bunch of labourers, is standing up to the PPDC brass? But there’s a certainty in the way Amy’s holding herself that tells him this isn’t news to her. Feeling his eyes on her, she glances over, hiking her eyebrows up like, _what?_

Phil Wilson has hidden depths?

Amy’s mouth quirks. “He and I had a long talk about ambition.”

Yeah, but _Phil?_

Who knew.

“I did, that’s why I’m --“ Amy pauses, distracted by the expression on Choi’s face. He looks at them, long-suffering, like pilots having one-sided conversations is as familiar as background music, and the amount of _history_ behind an expression like that dries her words into a patch in her throat.

She coughs to clear it.

“Can we send them a message?” she demands. “Can we tell them we’re all right?”

Kieren glances quickly at Choi in time to catch the tick of a muscle in his jaw.

No, then.

Amy flares up before he can say anything. “That’s not your decision! Where is everybody?” He looks blank. “Everybody who’s deciding what’s going to happen to them!”

“There’s a council sitting in LOCCENT …” Choi starts, and then his eyes grow wide with alarm when they both swing their legs to the floor. He takes a step back, unconsciously blocking them from getting to the hatch.

“You can’t!” he tells them. It is, of course, a very stupid thing to say, and Amy moves but Kieren gets there first, hands closing around Choi’s arms and physically manhandling him out of the way. “You can’t get in there. Your ID chips won’t swipe through!”

Kieren glances back at Amy, finds her eyebrows cathedral-high on her forehead and her grey mouth skewed to the side.

This is familiar, isn’t it.

“Well, then,” Amy sways past Kieren, getting in Choi’s face. “You better go tell them we want to talk to them.”

He’s better about not backing down from her, but his throat still works; a Pavlovian response to the proximity of her kaiju-colored eyes. When he says nothing, she prompts him with an inquisitive noise, deep in her throat, and Kieren swears -- _swears_ he sees it hum, a faint bluish glow under the skin of her neck.

“Come and get us when they’re ready,” Amy says to Choi, shoving past him into the passageway. “We’ll be with Blue.”

“Guys?” Choi says, but Amy lifts her chin and starts off down the corridor, Kieren in step behind her.

“Guys.” And louder. “Guys!”

They pause, and look back, standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

Choi shifts his weight to his hip. “Erm,” he says eloquently, and glances away. “You wanna maybe put on some pants first?”

They look down at themselves. Then at each other.

“Right.”

 

*

 

In April of 2033, the PPDC dispatches Commander Maxine Martin to the Wall of Life operation in the Bering Sea -- the Wall, of course, being more of a controversial postwar preventative tactic than an actual one -- to investigate the suspicious chemical readings picked up by the University of Alaska probes. These readings don't match the ones the Aleutian base itself continually reports.

(“It doesn’t matter that we were doing their work for them,” Amy tells him in an undertone. “What mattered was whose intellectual property we were using to do it. Is it J-tech? Oh, better confiscate that, then!”

“They have to know it was one of their own who betrayed them,” Kieren says back. “Who else could have given us the designs for Blue but somebody on their staff. _That’s_ the person they should have gone after, not the Aleutian.”

“Yeah, but we’re easier to punish. Us -- and the inmates,” she adds, remembering that Zombies aren’t the only class suffering because of this.

After a beat of silence, he glances over to find her flexing her arms, her cheeks puffed out.

He rolls his eyes. “Is that us, then?” he inquires, poking at her bicep, already knowing the answer: it is, after all, Blue’s most famous pose. Amy says, “of course it is,” anyway, fondly, and they both laugh, glad as they always are that of all the places and times they could have been, they were here, with each other.)

Commander Martin gives the administrators no warning that she's coming, and in the middle of the ensuing uproar, the Aleutian labourers -- a motley mix of American and Russian inmates serving their parole, and Zombies -- seize their chance and stage a coup.

The official account of the events of the Bering Spring, as it will later by called by publications like the Pan-Pacific TIME magazine, will make it sound like a lucky coincidence, which Kieren knows it isn't. The Prophet warned Simon that Commander Martin had made up her mind, and Simon in turn told his Buenakai followers, who put into action the plan they’d been compiling almost from the moment Amy had turned to Mahmoud on the platform and told him, _the name is Blue!_

It's not like there hadn't been any revolts before then: peel up any solid rock and you'll find the ants scrambling underneath, and humanity calmly and also not-so-calmly protested nearly every step of the Kaiju War along the way. Lobbyists peacefully campaigned for Zombie rights -- Zombies themselves, of course, being the last to hear about it, isolated in the camps as they were -- and extremists like the ones that supposedly assassinated Newt Geiszler had their say too.

The Aleutian is the first success.

Official accounts will cite several factors that hadn't been at play in other places: the remoteness of the rig, the unprecedented cooperation between human and non-human, and, of course, the existence of Redeemer Blue -- built by prisoners, piloted by Zombies.

People will rally around nothing the way they’ll rally around a jaeger.

But no matter how they try, the official account cannot tell you what it's like for the people who are there when it happens.

 

*

 

There's a sensation in Philip Wilson's stomach that pitches like gravity, twisting and pretzeling in on itself, and he closes his eyes, swaying in place and feeling precariously balanced somewhere very high up with nothing below him but a fall.

Then he turns to his technicians -- the ones present in the ready room with him, and Livia's shadowy face projected above the console -- and gives the order to sink Redeemer Blue.

A horrific, charged silence answers him.

Then, on a small boat hundreds of miles out to sea, a navy-shirted tech rises from her chair and says, simply, "No."

Phil looks at Livia and Livia stares back, her shoulders set and a blisteringly loyal expression on her grainy, ill-lit face. He makes a short gesture, and two other techs stand to relieve her of her post. She twists under their hands, depresses the "speak" button, and gives a command to the pilots in her mother tongue.

The PPDC cannot have Blue.

They _cannot_ have Blue. Phil Wilson will entomb it and its pilots before he will let the PPDC take everything he's built here and make it go away. Besides, Zombies can handle a few hours at the bottom of the sea; they have the evolutionary advantage. They’ll fetch them when this is over.

(It doesn’t occur to him that when they return, that Blue wouldn’t be there.)

(There are no official accounts of Phil Wilson in that moment, when Dr Abdullah lifts her head and tells him, “We can’t find them, sir.” There aren’t even words, really, to describe the vacuum of space that opens up, that sucks every drop of air out of his body, just like that.)

 

*

 

On the Wall, the labourers wait.

Some wear Blue's decal hidden on their bodies, and even the ones that don't wear it know they're waiting for something. Around them, the wind careens up the Wall, whistling through its weakest, unfinished parts.

Zoned at the very base, a labourer named Henry Lonsdale stops what he's doing.

Very calmly, he puts down his equipment and walks to the lift. Behind him, unaware, his supervisor listens to an incoming radio call with a perplexed pinch to his brow, and so no one stops Henry from opening the doors. No one notices until he opens his mouth.

Henry draws in a deep breath, tilts his head so that he looks straight up the lift to the point where it disappears, and sings the loudest, cleanest, purest note that has every come out of his throat. It's unmistakable, even at the very top of the Wall.

"It's like the whole Wall hummed," someone will say later. "You could feel in it in every beam and every cinderblock. The wind carried it for miles, I swear.”

At the signal, a hundred labourers stop and put down their tools.

With the ease and energy that comes with anticipation, they turn on their supervisors. The Wall hums with Henry's eerie call, and nobody hesitates.

 

*

 

Afterward, Nina steps over Oliver’s bound feet and picks up a headset.

“Redeemer Blue,” she calls. “Do you copy?”

She waits, but there's no reply.

“Redeemer Blue. Do you copy?”

Nothing. Just static.

She sinks into a technician’s chair and fiddles with dials, setting and resetting their positions, saying, “Do you copy?” and “Blue?” at regular intervals.

This goes on for an hour, then another, and more after that. Somewhere out at sea, Amy dies and Kieren dies and then they resurrect together, and the whole time, Nina Abdullah calls and calls, until she is just saying words into the unresponsiveness; their names, then military codes, then whatever her dry, hoarse voice can close itself over. Around her, the rig goes quiet and loud and quiet again.

She isn't listening for anything except what's on her headset, so she doesn't hear the footsteps until they're beside her.

A hand descends on hers, stilling it.

“Dr Abdullah,” Simon Monroe says to her, his voice a deep, stillwater sound. “Have you gotten any sleep?”

She blinks at him, and pulls the headset down far enough to ask, “Is it late?”

His mouth skews, and she looks around. She realizes, blinking absently, that the personnel she’d overpowered and tied up are gone, though she couldn’t say she remembers anyone coming in and removing them. It doesn’t matter; they're insignificant, and they hadn't been expecting her. Demure, differential Nina Abdullah, the sidekick of the K-scientist duo who didn’t meet anybody’s eyes, suddenly coming at them with the strength and stamina of a Zombie? They hadn’t stood a chance.

Simon sinks into the seat beside her, eyes skipping over the console in front of them. He turns to her.

"You should get some sleep," he tries again. "Doctor."

She doesn't deign that with a response.

Instead, she assesses him. He looks stretched thin, drawn too taut over his own bones. Blue-black Zombie blood stains his sweater cuffs, leaving tacky marks on his wrists.

The supervisors are all trained in how to handle disorderly conduct from inmates. She'd gone through the training herself, even practiced with Oliver and listened to his tasteless jokes. Obstinately, it was all so that they'd be prepared for a feral attack. The only way to kill a Zombie is to go for the brain, and every supervisor walks around like it's not a matter of _if,_ but _when._

She looks at the blood on Simon's wrists, and doesn't ask.

(By wordless agreement, Simon had been the one to take Brian's head, careful of the places where the shattered pieces of skull shifted and caved, and Zoe took his feet, and together, they lifted him onto the table next to the rest. Mahmoud brought a fresh sheet to shroud him with.

The next Simon saw them, they were sitting at a table with the Russian brothers. Mahmoud had Zoe's hand in both of his, pressing his mouth to her knuckles one-by-one, as comforting as he has ever been, and the sight of it _ached_ in Simon's chest like it was a window he'd left open on a windy day. He turned and went straight to the ready room, wanting to hear about the pilots.)

Without saying a word, she pulls the headset back to her ear, listening to the unbroken static.

Whatever’s on her face, it makes Simon sit up, his attention drawing in and then telescoping down to her.

“What is it?” he asks, his own exhaustion forgotten.

Nina hasn't said more than two or three words at a time to the kaiju priest before, but she explains, "They must have had a contingency plan, just like we did -- I didn't know, I didn't -- but they sunk Blue," and the desolate look that yawns in his face makes her want to stand up and put distance between them, like it's something contagious.

His eyes dart away, and she can still see the kaiju-colored glow to them even as they lid.

"Can we -- who can we send to search for them?"

She points at a series of lights on the console, which flick red, then green. “Livia,” she says by way of explanation, and watches Simon pick up the headset. He determines which channel is the clearest, and she listens to his conversation with the tech on the other end. His mouth compresses further with each exchange, until it's just a thin, lipless line.

Nina’s had the same conversation: nothing’s coming up on sonar around the rendezvous point, which might not mean anything. But they are worrying close to the canyon. There are places between the rocks where Blue could sink and disappear.

When they finish and he pulls the headset off again, he looks back at her. 

“This isn’t --“ he starts, and stops himself.

“I know,” Nina agrees, and pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers more out of habit than real discomfort; at uni, before everything, whenever she got overwhelmed, she got the worst headaches, and the two are linked in her sense memory; the reality of a situation she didn’t think she could handle, and the pressure-pain in her head.

Then she stills, and slowly, she opens her eyes.

She tilts her head back and removes her contacts. First one, then the other, setting them down on the edge of the console.

She blinks, and then she turns the bleach-corroded color of her eyes on Simon, who sucks in a startled breath, his eyebrows darting upward. She’d wondered if Kieren or Amy had told him about her -- if they’d told anybody, it would have been him -- but the open astonishment and wonder on his face tells her this is news to him. His own blue, reflected back in her.

"Doctor," he says quietly.

Nina opens her mouth and finds herself saying, “There were two of us at Preston. Zombies,” she almost trips over the word like it’s a polyp on the inside of her mouth, ingrained from years of avoiding it in conjunction with herself. “Pretending to be human.”

She reaches out, turning a dial and listening to the steady whine of the static in her ears change pitch.

“I was K-Science, and he was three years ahead of me, a cadet, and we agreed we must be crazy, kaiju-creatures joining up with the PPDC. But we knew that’s where we had to be.” Her voice grows softer. “We swore we’d change things. We swore we’d fix it.”

Her fingers still. Around her, the ready room is silent. 

“This doesn’t feel like fixing.”

“What happened to him?” Simon wants to know, tilting his head.

“I don’t know,” she says, heavily. “I don’t -- I meant to ask Amy and -- Kieren about him. He’s from their neck of the woods, I thought they might get a kick out of that. It was one of those things I was going to do -- after.”

“They could -- they’re not --“ He pauses, reframes his question, and asks, “They could still be alive?”

“Yes,” answers Nina, and she turns her attention back to the console.

“Blue?” she calls. “Copy, Blue.”

Simon sits beside her, listening, and then picks up his headset, changes the channel, and adds his voice to hers.

Amy and Kieren, if they were alive, would answer. They know it.

And so they remain like that; two people, kept awake by love.

“Blue, do you copy?”

“Redeemer Blue.”

“Coyote tango. Boxwood.”

“Amy. Amy.”

“Kieren.”

“Foxtrot.”

“Walker.”

“Blue.”

 

*

 

Kieren isn’t sure what he expects to see when the hatch opens and admits them into LOCCENT, but a war table isn’t it.

It’s L-shaped, with eight people positioned around it, embroiled in heavy discussion as if they hadn’t once stopped since they stepped off their aircraft. Choi comes around, fitting into a space between the Commander and someone Kieren vaguely recognizes as Russian -- government? Military? Both? -- and makes nine. Kieren and Amy, who remain standing, make eleven.

He touches his fingertips to the table’s edge, imagining he can feel the minute vibration of the holographic projector. The surface shows a topographical map of the ocean floor, and as he darts his eyes across it, he realizes it’s a -- inferior -- version of the same map the labourers had been making to keep track of the purification of the Bering Sea. Someone has penciled in “introduce a shoal here?” in glowing letters close to Kieren’s hand, in an area where contamination would be the lowest. There must be an environmentalist on this council.

The Commander looks up then, and abruptly stops speaking.

Silence spreads outwards from there, as one-by-one the others realize who, exactly, stands at the head of their table. Or, rather, _what’s_ standing there, having made it as far as the heart of their Shatterdome:

Zombies. Kaiju-creatures.

Between them, Amy’s hand fishes for his. She straightens her back so that they stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and it reminds him.

Zombies and kaiju-creautres, a morbid mix of alien and human. But they're drift-compatible jaeger pilots, too.

The Commander -- Maxine Martin -- shifts her weight back, folding her arms across her chest. Her mouth pulls itself up on one side, wry and near-smiling. 

Her eyes skip right over Amy like a stone across water, sinking onto Kieren. Like Simon, she has a way of looking at you like she’s got you all figured out. Also like Simon, it makes Kieren want to start a fight with her for no good reason.

“Well,” she says into the sudden hush. “If it isn’t our Norfolk graduate.”

A rude noise escapes Amy’s throat before Kieren can stop her.

“I,” he says, wondering what that has to do with anything, “never graduated from anywhere. I did want to go to art school, though, once upon a time.”

“Give it up, Commander,” someone else cuts in snidely from the left. He’s a barrel-chested American with a lot of brass on the front of his uniform and knuckles as rough-edged as gravel, poking out of his fists, which are balled up on the edge of the table. If Kieren didn’t know better, he’d’ve said he was interchangeable with the foreman from the Aleutian. “What’s the likelihood that out of all the rotters that went through that facility, the one we want waltzes right in?”

Commander Martin makes a noncommittal noise, not taking her eyes off Kieren.

Snorting derisively at her non-answer, the man redirects his attention to them. With a look on his face like he’s addressing something he’d find on the u-bend, he drawls, “I don’t suppose you’re the one who turned rotten after skinny-dipping in a contaminated reservoir?”

Kieren feels Amy’s surprise like the flare of a struck match.

“No,” he says.

 _They’re looking for me!_ Amy thinks, and it resonates in his head, crystalline. _Why are they looking for me?_

The man spreads his hands at Commander Martin. “There. You see? Now can we put your crazy cultists aside and focus on something _important?”_

“Yes, _let’s,”_ Amy leans forward eagerly, the light from the table catching off the glow in her eyes.

“Don’t _you_ get started with me,” he fires back before she can say anything else, his interest as sudden and pointed as flint. “How about that homemade monstrosity we’ve got in the third bay and where you stole it from?”

“That’s _our_ jaeger! We built it at the Aleutian --”

“Bullshit,” he says immediately, speaking right over the murmuring that blows across the table like gusting snow. “Kaiju can’t pilot jaegers, that’s the stupidest load of blue I have ever heard.”

“And yet,” snaps another voice, caustic and strangely familiar. “The evidence is right in front of you.”

Kieren’s eyes dart past Choi and Commander Martin’s cool, assessing gaze, and recognition sticks its foot out and trips him up even before his eyes land on the speaker. At the far end of the table, noticeably apart from the others and watching him and Amy both with a keen, hungry expression, is Dr Hermann Gottlieb.

“Oh,” whispers Amy.

The world’s most famous (living) K-scientist drags himself upright, planting his cane on the ground and redistributing his weight onto it. He looks across the table at them, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

Like the jaeger pilots from his childhood, his reputation makes Dr Gottlieb taller and more imposing in Kieren’s imagination than he is standing in front of him. In reality, Kieren can’t help but think that he looks -- shabby. His clothes are out of date (and this is coming from someone who’s been isolated from the world for years) and patched, which makes absolutely no sense. After the end of the war, Dr Geiszler and Dr Gottlieb took their newfound fame and made _so much money_ off of it. He remembers listening to his parents talk about it in the openly judgmental tone people often reserve for celebrities: actresses and rock stars and the like who just don’t know when to know they’re washed up. The K-scientists who drifted with the brain of a newborn kaiju and figured out the master plan of the invasion didn’t settle for being famous. They got _rich,_ too.

And as terrible as it is to think -- _no hard feelings,_ Kieren adds mentally to the Dr Geiszler he met in the drift -- Dr Gottlieb would have gotten even richer after his partner’s very public assassination.

So where could that money have gone?

“Right in front of us?” echoes another council member incredulously. Her eyes, so uniformly black they appear almost pupil-less, skid over Dr Gottlieb uncomfortably and dart away just as quick. “They’re _feral._ There are _feral Zombies_ in this room! They could contaminate all of us!”

“So don’t drive us to bite!” Amy snaps at her, her throat flushing blue.

For a beat, Kieren sees her as the others must: teeth bared, lit up in warning like a predator.

And then it passes and she’s just Amy again, the same Amy that everybody’s always overlooking.

“The pilots have been under my supervision since we disengaged their neural handshake,” Choi says firmly, in a tone that brooks no argument. “Despite the physical manifestation, they’ve never once displayed any feral behavior.”

Unbidden, Kieren’s mind flashes back to the first question Choi had asked them upon finding them awake -- _do you need anything?_

At the time, after what they’d just gone through, it had been an almost unfathomable question. Now, Kieren can’t stop thinking of things that he needs: right now, for instance, he needs Zoe here, so that she can yell at these people. She’d love that. She’d have a whole keynote speech prepared, and between her and Amy, this whole table wouldn’t have time to _think,_ much less form a counterargument.

He needs to get out of here. He needs to see Zoe in her bandana and her wedding dress. He needs Mahmoud to ask him, officially, to be his best man -- Kieren might have said no to all those invites for a match, but he won’t say no to this. 

(Do they even do stag nights in Montana?)

He needs -- something in his chest contracts, unwillingly -- he needs Simon here. Simon who said to him, _I believe in a great many things on earth,_ and meant Redeemer Blue. Simon’s belief would make this a lot easier to endure.

 _Kiss me two days from now,_ Kieren had said, and he doesn’t think it occurred to either one of them that he’d be the promise-breaker.

(It’s the kind of thing that spoils you, having someone to kiss regularly, and thinking about it makes the inside of Kieren’s lips ache in a phantom way, a memory of pressure on his mouth. He needs Simon here simply to kiss him again. He needs Simon here so that Amy can hug him the way she likes best. Muddled between their heads, he can picture it as clearly as if it’s already happened: Amy planting a kiss on Simon’s mouth just to tease, feigning surprise and saying, “whoops, forgot which head I was in!” She’d make a habit of it, too, until it became a joke, the kind they wear down until it’s threadbare and loved. Theirs.)

They need to see Simon so that they know he’s all right.

Isn’t it strange, how now that he’s finally off the Aleutian rig, the only thing he needs is to be _back_ \-- he needs the labourers.

They’re important. They’re his.

Kieren Walker, with a hundred sets of footprints on his heart.

“Your prejudices are showing,” Dr Gottlieb’s telling the table at large. “Why do I get the feeling that’s a typical state of affairs for you lot. Please,” he finishes, poisonously. “Do us all a favor and keep your mouths _shut.”_

The way he says it strikes deep in Kieren’s kaiju hindbrain as a very Newt Geiszler thing to say.

He turns to them again, and inclines his torso in their direction in something that might, bizarrely, be a bow.

“Mr Walker, Ms Dyer,” he says, clipped. “It’s an honor to meet you at last. The numbers you’ve given us to work with are very impressive,” he gestures across the table, still showing the holographic image of the Bering sea floor. “You’ve certainly set a standard for the rest of us to match.”

His eyes fall briefly on their joined hands, and the muscle in his jaw jumps again.

Kieren feels it -- he couldn’t tell you _how_ he knows what Herman Gottlieb is feeling in this exact moment, but he knows. They’re standing across from a man who has lost his drift partner.

 _We were there when Newt Geiszler died and you were not,_ he thinks. _I’m sorry for that._

Dr Gottlieb’s eyes meet his, and there’s that expression again: keen, possessive, something that’s almost _proud._ It reminds Kieren of how Phil had looked at Redeemer Blue in the Bay, a man with all of his eggs in one good-looking basket.

Just like that, he knows.

Dr Gottlieb's mouth twitches at the corner. Kieren imagines him masked, his voice distorted.

Of course, of _course._

A strangeness comes over him, all at once -- not a strangeness like the bends, because that was Blue physically expressing itself, trying to interact with its surroundings the same way they did, like a child uncomprehendingly mimicking its parents in order to learn. This strangeness is more like a weight, like realizing he would have to pilot Blue on his own just a second before it crash-landed on him; Blue, too big for his brain, the crawler and the chains. Did Raleigh Beckett ever feel anything like this?

He isn’t Beckett ( _you are to me!_ Amy, of course, follows his train of thought, and her sentiment flares up easily in his head.) Some people are made to be alone, but Kieren Walker isn’t one of those people, and neither, he thinks, was Beckett.

No, this is more the weight of the knowledge that things are going to change. Here, now, in the Alaska Shatterdome’s LOCCENT.

Redeemer Blue was not built to fight kaiju.

It was built to help the recovery: a task that, now that they’re in the middle of it, is proving to be just as herculean. 

He and Amy are the first of their kind, but there will be more jaegers. Jaegers to build, jaegers to improve, jaegers to defend, jaegers to explore, jaegers for tasks they don’t yet know need doing.

It’s not the Second Rising that the Buenakai chant about. It’s not the second coming of the _kaiju_ that’s arrived, that Kieren and Amy have brought about.

It’s the Second Rising of the _jaegers._

In unison, Kieren and Amy step around the table, filling into their places as if they’ve always been, next to the officers and the scientists and the man who made himself the Prophet. Eleven people around a war table, a battlefield of Kaiju Blue spread out in front of them. The sight of it itches -- there’s something missing.

Just as Kieren thinks it, Commander Martin speaks up. She’s still watching them, like they’re a blue-tinged bone she’s unwilling to let go.

“What,” she asks, “are we going to do with them now that we have them?”

Amy snorts. “You don’t have us.”

Her eyebrows tilt. “You walked right in here and gave your jaeger to us,” she gestures, indicating the glass that looks out over the bays. In the third, Blue’s fishbowl body is tilted up towards them, arms still raised like it’s ready to smash something. 

Kieren smiles without meaning to. He’s pretty sure that when they walked in, Blue had been facing the other direction.

“The name,” he hears himself say, “is Redeemer Blue, and it is ours, not yours.”

Footsteps, then, in the hallway -- the loud and sure clip of boot heels approaching.

They’re audible long before the security-coded hatch opens, and their owner steps through -- a woman, with sharp black boots, a sharp black coat that cuts off at her knees, and sharp black hair that cuts off at her chin with the same precision. She’s holding a manilla folder to her chest. She lifts her head and takes them all in.

At first, Kieren doesn’t recognize her, not until Amy inhales suddenly and whispers, “oh my god, I’m going to faint,” and then he does.

Mako Mori comes to a halt at the end of the table.

Her heels click together, and just like that, the tableau is complete. The itchiness in Kieren’s head evaporates, leaving nothing but certainty behind. He’s sure of this like he’s already seen it happen, like it’s another one of his hallucinations coming true. A council of twelve.

Mori’s eyes track swiftly around the table -- her eyes crinkle up in their corners when she sees Choi, who grins at her, and flatten almost instantly into borderline distaste when they move on to the American -- before landing on Kieren and Amy.

Her eyes widen fractionally, either by their eyes or Kieren’s blue mouth or Amy’s blue throat or something else about them, and then she inclines her head. Her hair swoops chinward with the motion, and Kieren realizes she’s got kaiju-colored streaks dyed to frame her face. In a city-cemetery, he thinks, that would be a signal, one Zombie to another. But Mako Mori marked herself with kaiju-blue long before they did.

“You are the pilots of the homemade jaeger?” she asks, in a voice that reminds him of Nina Abdullah.

“Yes, ma’am,” says Amy breathlessly.

“You are the ones who died, and your jaeger brought you back?” She says it like she already believes it to be true; after all, there are only a handful of people in the world remaining who’ve ever piloted a jaeger, and a significant portion of them are in this room. She knows what they’re capable of.

“We are,” Kieren answers.

Slowly, Mako Mori begins to smile.

“That,” she says quietly, and with great warmth, “is amazing. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

And since Kieren knows it’s going to happen, the way drift partners do, his arm is already stretched out to the side so that Amy has somewhere to go when she makes a small, ecstatic noise -- and promptly swoons.

*

 

*

 

**Epilogue**

*

*

Somewhere on the M6, a bright yellow head sticks itself out of a bright yellow car and whoops, loud and carrying. Further down the slope, the horses flick their ears, unconcerned.

“This is the best day of my _life!”_ Henry Lonsdale shouts, half his torso hanging out the window.

He bangs his hand on the top of the coupe for emphasis. Inside, Frankie shouts something, but Henry can’t hear it, exhilarated by the wind that’s peeling his shirt off his chest and forcing him to squint. He swears the sight of all this green is knocking him silly. It could also be the velocity.

He fills his lungs and bellows, “I love you, England!”

England, being her usual self, deigns to give him no reply, although a motorist going in the opposite direction lays on their horn, the sound of it crescendoing as they flash by. Henry laughs in delight, too overwhelmed and grateful to care, because, like, he lives in a world where tits-arse-boring fields exist! Look at this boring landscape! It exists! He’s lived to see it again! Amazing! Flowers exist and Henry’s looking at them right now; heather and whatever that springy yellow stuff is!

How can it get better than this!

It does, of course, and Henry shifts his grip in order to shout, “Look, look! Frankie, look! _Trees!”_

“Henry, get your daft nog back in here!” Frankie yells at him, and he glances back past his own rump into the car interior.

The wind’s whipping Frankie’s cotton hair around her face, obscuring the growths along her eye ridges, but the expression on her face tells him that he’s pushing his luck, so he scoots back down so that he’s inside the compact car again. The upholstery vibrates noisily underneath him.

He leans forward to shout at Haley, “This car’s amazing!” 

He can scarcely hear his own voice over the wind and the beleaguered sound of the coupe’s engine, which sounds like it’s about twenty years too old to be handling this drive. The interior smells like petrol and fried food and his mum’s shampoo, the last of which is probably coming from Frankie.

Haley Preston gives him a skeptical look in the rearview mirror, like she can’t tell if he’s taking the piss or if he’s genuinely deranged.

It’s the same look she’s been giving him ever since she picked them up from his mum’s house in Brighton. Henry isn’t sure what he thought a widow would look like -- a Victorian black veil, some weeping, maybe? -- but the woman who’d been holding a teacup in his mother’s salon with the bemused expression of someone who wasn’t sure they trusted the series of events that got them there was _fit,_ with tall brown boots that matched her glossy hair. Henry’d almost tripped over himself at the sight of her, and did it again when she walked them out to her car, a wannabe-roadster with a fixed head painted in garish bumblebee colors.

She’s upgraded, too (“you can’t use that word to describe boyfriends, Henry!” Frankie hisses at him, aggrieved, but really, Amir is aces, Frankie, come on, how is he _not_ an improvement?) but she kept her dead Zombie husband’s hot little car and for that, Henry is so happy to be alive today.

It’s spilling out of him, the seams holding him together straining with the pressure when he turns to Frankie and says, “Never thought we’d get to see trees again, eh?”

“You’re off your head,” she retorts, but she’s smiling, and the three of them zoom onwards, heading north.

Roarton is exactly what he’s expecting it to be, once Haley turns them off the motorway and the noisy roar of the engine dies down to something a little more bearable: for a village, it’s basically two hills with a road that cuts between them, following the river. The hill with the view is dappled with sunlight and two- and three-storey homes with greenish, ornamental yards. The opposite hill sports clustering, lumpy growths of bungalows and bankside tenement housing.

Haley seems to know exactly where she’s going. She doesn’t need to consult her handheld at all before taking a winding street up the hill on the nice side of town, past an abandoned barn and a churchyard with a radio tower propped awkwardly in the middle of it, fixed at the top with the familiar shape of a toxic-rain siren.

She pulls up to a house with a low stone wall that separates it from the pavement, an estate car parked in the drive, and a jaeger pilot up to his elbows in a bed of perennials. Helping him is a white-haired man in jeans and orthopedic shoes, his sleeves rolled up -- Henry could have spotted him for a dad from outer space.

He's all but straining against his seatbelt by this point, but to his surprise, it’s Frankie who’s out of the coupe first -- how, he doesn’t know. Witchcraft, probably.

Kieren’s head comes up at the slam of the car door, and his eyes widen, kaiju-blue all the way through.

“Frankie!” he cries, delighted, getting to his feet and dropping the trimmers but not managing to get his gloves off before she clears the wall and he’s got an armful of cloud-headed girl.

Henry’s there a beat later, throwing his arms around them both with enough force to make Kieren grunt with surprise, rocking off balance. He takes a smart step backwards so they don’t go tumbling into the new shrub line. Henry, who may or may not have burst into terribly, shockingly intense tears the first time he saw his mother afterwards, clamps his eyes firmly shut and leans all his weight onto Kieren.

" _Oof._ Hi, guys."

Kieren extracts an arm from where it got pinned between them and gives them both a fond squeeze before politely trying to let go, which only makes Frankie and Henry cling to him tighter.

“Oh, okay,” he says faintly, and commits to the embrace, burying his face against their heads.

They stay there, a six-legged tangle of arms and blues, while Henry _swears_ his dead heart tries to strangle itself against his ribs, swelling and fit to burst.

Beyond them, he hears the clip of Haley’s boots coming around the wall instead of over it, and Kieren’s dad’s awkward, stilted attempt at conversation.

“-- to meet you, I’m Steve.”

“Oh, hi. I don’t think I met you the last time I was here. I’m Haley. I, um -- my husband was at one of those camps with, um, Kieren.”

“Well, then! Glad you could make it for a visit while Kieren’s in the home country. We’re always delighted to have you. Is your husband coming, or --“

“No. No, he was, um … They …”

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have …”

“No, it’s all right. Honestly. They took him from me years ago, didn’t allow us any contact. We were apart for longer than we’d been married, so I was … almost expecting it, really.”

“Right, right. Still,” there’s a forced brightness to Mr Walker’s voice. “That’s what we’re hoping to change, eh?”

“Yes, quite.”

When they’re ready, Frankie and Henry and Kieren let go of each other at the same time, and after he gets his heavy work gloves off, he rests his hands on their shoulders. They're all dressed alike, Henry notices; Frankie's socks go all the way up to the hem of her shorts and are rainbow-striped, while Henry himself has paired candy-apple red trousers with a neon shirt. Kieren is similarly difficult to look at -- his jumper is so yellow it could stop traffic. There isn't a single article of grey on their persons.

It's great. They're great. Henry loves everything.

“You all right, then?” Kieren asks, studying them closely.

Even though he’s expecting it, the sudden up-close view of the blueness behind Kieren’s teeth sends a sudden shock of panic down Henry’s spine.

 _Feral!_ he thinks, unable to help it, like it's a toxic-rain siren going off in his head. _They'll kill him!_

 _No, they won't, they can't,_ he remembers, just as quickly.

Unconsciously, he glances at the collar of Kieren’s jumper, but of course he can’t see anything.

He’s heard, though, that Kieren’s got Beckett-marks on his ribs, stamped into his skin, and that they glow, too, like a heartbeat.

That could be make-believe, of course -- Henry’s heard a lot of outrageous things about Zombies since coming back to the real world, only about a quarter of which seemed to be based in any scientific fact. If there’s one thing he knows for certain about the Zombie pilots -- _his_ Zombie pilots! -- it’s that they’re saps. He loves them. They’re saps and he loves them, and the going-ons of their underbits isn’t his business.

“Yeah,” Frankie says when Henry volunteers nothing, and Kieren’s smile relaxes.

“Are you staying with Mrs Lonsdale?” he asks her.

Henry gets his stride back. “Of course she is!” Frankie’s not going back to the Kirbys. Not ever, ever, ever. Henry will take her and they’ll live on an iceberg in the Bering Sea before she goes back to those tossers.

Kieren nods. “Everybody leaving you alone?”

“Yeah, mostly,” Frankie shrugs.

“-- what she means,” Henry adds, “is that the Undead Prophet or whatever and his cultists are still hunting for the swimmer -- you know,” he explains, catching the peculiar expression that flashes across Kieren’s face, “the first person who ever turned Zombie, and someone’s got it into their heads that it might be Frankie.”

“And I know that it’s not.” She rolls her eyes. “But nobody’s taking my word for it.”

“Do you know _why_ they’re looking for the swimmer?” Kieren murmurs, still looking a bit odd about it.

“I’ve got nothing,” Henry says, kneejerk. “I just went for the singing.”

And Frankie, who’s always been smarter than Henry -- that’s one of his favorite things about her -- says, “The last time K-science asked people to come forward, those people were rounded up, cut off from their loved ones, and sent to labour camps. The PPDC has burned that bridge -- they’re not going to openly ask a Zombie of all people to volunteer themselves, so they’re using a faction of the Buenakai to seek them out instead. The goal is probably still the same -- defend the earth against the kaiju, no matter what.”

“You’re likely not wrong,” Kieren says to her.

Haley steps up then, smiling shyly, and Kieren lets go of them both to turn to her, his eyes sliding unfocused for just a second. Henry used to see that expression all the time on-rig.

“Amy thinks your boots are gorgeous,” he passes along, and Haley’s whole face lights up.

“Aren’t they?” She tilts her knee, inviting scrutiny to the footwear in question. “I wasn’t sure, but she seemed to know what she was talking about.”

“She did,” Kieren says confidently, and they smile at each other in the way of people who’ve become friends rather recently, and are glad they made that decision. Finding and befriending Freddie Preston’s widow must have been one of the very first things Kieren and Amy did, and for that, Henry finds himself thinking, Stacker Pentecost would be proud of them.

His hand darts out, gripping Kieren’s elbow. 

All of his questions start bubbling up at once -- is it true, then, that he and Amy can ghost-drift even when they’re not connected to a PONs?

Is that why they’re not afraid to be apart -- Kieren here visiting his family, Amy at Mako Mori's station in Hong Kong?

Is it true that, unlike humans, a Zombie’s brain spends minimal effort on bodily maintenance, leaving it free to develop other capacities, like Amy and Kieren’s ability to connect through the drift to speak to Redeemer Blue remotely?

There were J-tech officers in the Hong Kong Shatterdome who would swear that sometimes the jaegers would turn their heads or power up their floodlights when nobody was piloting them -- is this like that? Or has it evolved beyond that? Is Blue sentient? Can Zombies, who are part-kaiju, and something that is part-jaeger coexist in the same brain? Redeemer Blue was built to build, after all; that’s exactly what it’s doing.

But before he can jumble any of this into words, the clouds part in the sky above -- 

\-- and --

\-- and the most amazing event of Henry Lonsdale’s entire life happens in a small patch of sunshine as it alights on the Walker’s yard.

Past Kieren’s shoulder, the front door to the house opens, and a girl steps out.

No, not a girl.

A woman.

A vision of loveliness. The most perfect person he's ever seen.

Tall, with hair dyed a brilliant fire-engine red all the way down to the roots -- what a brilliant idea! Red hair! Amazing! Who thought of that! Henry’s going to have to try that immediately! -- and a slim, narrow face that she shares with Kieren. She’s half-turned to address someone still in the house.

“-- don’t see what the bother is. You might not like him, but unlike _somebody --“_

She raises her voice, now clearly intending to be heard in the yard.

“-- at least _I_ didn’t bring home a _priest.”_

At Henry’s side, Kieren makes a low (and very fond) noise of amusement.

But Henry, standing there gape-mouthed, can’t tear his eyes away, and so misses it when Kieren and Frankie both look at him.

They follow his gaze.

Jemima Walker turns at last, her eyes finding all of them standing there, and Henry’s life is complete.

In front of God, Allah, Buddha, and the kaiju-whoever, he _swears_ it. His life is complete. He wants for nothing else.

Frankie groans loudly.

“Henry,” and that’s Kieren, whom Henry Lonsdale will follow into the breach, he swears that, too. “Henry, _no.”_

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> The **minor character death** tag refers to Freddie Preston and Newt Geiszler, who both die on-screen. Brian Cunningham and an OFC die offscreen. Amy and Kieren both die, too, but only temporarily.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/), if you're into that kind of thing.


End file.
